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 Collinder 50

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse
Please wait
Loading 0/4
Click and drag to rotate
Mouse wheel to zoom in/out
Touch with mouse to dismiss
The sky at

The Moon and Collinder 50 will make a close approach, passing within a mere 23.2 arcminutes of each other. The Moon will be 23 days old.

From Los Angeles , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 00:15 (PST) and reaching an altitude of 64° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:43.

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 -11.9; and Collinder 50 will be at mag 1.0. Both objects will lie in the constellation Taurus.

They will be close enough to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will also be visible to the naked eye or through a pair of binoculars.

A graph of the angular separation between the Moon and Collinder 50 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 04h26m40s 16°22'N Taurus -11.9 32'08"0
Collinder 50 04h27m00s 16°00'N Taurus 1.0 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 84° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 25 Aug 2016

The sky on 25 August 2016
Sunrise
06:19
Sunset
19:27
Twilight ends
20:55
Twilight begins
04:51

23-day old moon
Waning Crescent

39%

23 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:24 14:21 20:17
Venus 08:04 14:16 20:28
Moon 00:09 07:05 14:03
Mars 14:16 19:07 23:57
Jupiter 08:15 14:24 20:33
Saturn 14:02 19:06 00:11
All times shown in PDT.

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.

Image credit

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

Share

Los Angeles

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

34.05°N
118.24°W
PST

Color scheme