The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.

Close approach of the Moon and Uranus

Dominic Ford, Editor
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The sky at

The Moon and Uranus will make a close approach, passing within a mere 50.7 arcminutes of each other. From some parts of the world, the Moon will pass in front of Uranus, creating a lunar occultation. The Moon will be 24 days old.

From Jacksonville , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 02:47 (EDT) – 3 hours and 40 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 31° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:23.

Begin typing the name of a town near to you, and then select the town from the list of options which appear below.

The Moon will be at mag -11.7; and Uranus will be at mag 5.9. Both objects will lie in the constellation Aquarius.

They will be a little too widely separated to fit comfortably within the field of view of a telescope, but will be visible through a pair of binoculars.

A graph of the angular separation between the Moon and Uranus around the time of closest approach is available here.

The positions of the pair at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
The Moon 23h04m50s 7°37'S Aquarius -11.7 32'21"5
Uranus 23h03m20s 6°52'S Aquarius 5.9 3"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 75° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 16 Jun 2024

The sky on 16 June 2024
Sunrise
06:21
Sunset
20:30
Twilight ends
22:07
Twilight begins
04:44

10-day old moon
Waxing Gibbous

78%

10 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:30 13:36 20:41
Venus 06:37 13:39 20:42
Moon 15:35 21:21 03:00
Mars 03:26 09:58 16:30
Jupiter 05:03 11:56 18:49
Saturn 01:19 07:08 12:56
All times shown in EDT.

Source

The circumstances of this event were computed using the DE430 planetary ephemeris published by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

This event was automatically generated by searching the ephemeris for planetary alignments which are of interest to amateur astronomers, and the text above was generated based on an estimate of your location.

Related news

15 Nov 2005  –  Uranus ends retrograde motion
19 Jun 2006  –  Uranus enters retrograde motion
05 Sep 2006  –  Uranus at opposition
20 Nov 2006  –  Uranus ends retrograde motion

Image credit

The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.

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Jacksonville

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30.33°N
81.66°W
EDT

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