Simulated image courtesy of Tom Ruen.

The Moon at aphelion

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Moon feed

Objects: The Moon
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The sky at

The Moon's monthly orbit around the Earth will carry it to its furthest point from the Sun – its aphelion – at a distance of 0.9860 AU from the Sun.

This happens at around the time when the Moon's orbit carries it around the far side of the Earth as seen from the Sun, at around the same time that it passes full moon.

At the moment of the Moon's aphelion, the Earth will lie at a distance of 0.9835 AU from the Sun, and the Moon will lie at a distance of 0.9860 AU from the Sun.

This distance between the Earth and Moon will be 0.0025 AU (369,000 km).

The positions of the Sun and Moon in the sky will be:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Angular Size
The Moon 08h09m20s 17°14'N Cancer 32'21"
Sun (centre) 19h38m 21°30'S Sagittarius 32'31"

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0.

The sky on 12 Jan 2017

The sky on 12 January 2017
Sunrise
07:26
Sunset
17:08
Twilight ends
18:43
Twilight begins
05:51

14-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

98%

14 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:49 10:39 15:30
Venus 09:49 15:25 21:00
Moon 16:36 --:-- 07:18
Mars 10:11 15:57 21:42
Jupiter 00:25 06:04 11:43
Saturn 05:21 10:08 14:55
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

12 Jan 2017  –  Full Moon
19 Jan 2017  –  Moon at Last Quarter
27 Jan 2017  –  New Moon
03 Feb 2017  –  Moon at First Quarter

Image credit

Simulated image courtesy of Tom Ruen.

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