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
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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 6 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will become visible at around 18:25 (EST), 61° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting at 00:29.

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 32'17"2
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 83° from the Sun, which is in Aquarius at this time of year.

The sky on 4 Mar 2017

The sky on 4 March 2017
Sunrise
06:20
Sunset
17:47
Twilight ends
19:19
Twilight begins
04:49

6-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

49%

6 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:26 11:58 17:31
Venus 06:54 13:38 20:22
Moon 10:18 17:26 00:38
Mars 07:59 14:38 21:16
Jupiter 20:48 02:27 08:05
Saturn 02:08 06:49 11:29
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.

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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Fairfield

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Longitude:
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41.14°N
73.26°W
EST

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