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 52.4 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 13 days old.

From Cambridge , the pair will be visible between 19:03 and 03:56. They will become accessible at around 19:03, when they rise to an altitude of 21° above your eastern horizon. They will reach their highest point in the sky at 23:30, 53° above your southern horizon. They will become inaccessible at around 03:56 when they sink below 21° above your western horizon.

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 -12.8; and Uranus will be at mag 5.7. Both objects will lie in the constellation Pisces.

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 01h07m20s 5°29'N Pisces -12.8 33'19"0
Uranus 01h06m20s 6°19'N Pisces 5.7 3"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 165° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 21 Nov 2024

The sky on 21 November 2024
Sunrise
06:40
Sunset
16:16
Twilight ends
17:55
Twilight begins
05:01

20-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

56%

20 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:38 12:59 17:20
Venus 10:08 14:29 18:51
Moon 20:55 04:36 12:04
Mars 20:43 04:09 11:36
Jupiter 17:18 00:49 08:20
Saturn 13:06 18:36 00:07
All times shown in EST.

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

11 Oct 2015  –  Uranus at opposition
25 Dec 2015  –  Uranus ends retrograde motion
29 Jul 2016  –  Uranus enters retrograde motion
15 Oct 2016  –  Uranus at opposition

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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Cambridge

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42.38°N
71.11°W
EST

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