Simulated image courtesy of Tom Ruen.

The Moon at perihelion

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Moon feed

Objects: The Moon
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The Moon's monthly orbit around the Earth will carry it to its closest point to the Sun – its perihelion – at a distance of 0.9953 AU from the Sun.

This happens at around the time when the Moon's orbit carries it between the Sun and the Earth, at around the same time that it passes new moon.

At the moment of the Moon's perihelion, the Earth will lie at a distance of 0.9974 AU from the Sun, and the Moon will lie at a distance of 0.9953 AU from the Sun.

This distance between the Earth and Moon will be 0.0025 AU (380,000 km).

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

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Angular Size
The Moon 22h06m00s 11°21'S Aquarius 31'23"
Sun (centre) 00h17m 1°51'N Pisces 32'04"

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0.

The sky on 25 Mar 2017

The sky on 25 March 2017
Sunrise
07:03
Sunset
19:26
Twilight ends
20:57
Twilight begins
05:33

27-day old moon
Waning Crescent

6%

27 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:39 14:14 20:49
Venus 06:26 13:00 19:33
Moon 05:40 11:14 16:55
Mars 08:35 15:29 22:24
Jupiter 20:30 02:13 07:56
Saturn 02:00 06:46 11:33
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

20 Mar 2017  –  Moon at Last Quarter
27 Mar 2017  –  New Moon
03 Apr 2017  –  Moon at First Quarter
11 Apr 2017  –  Full Moon

Image credit

Simulated image courtesy of Tom Ruen.

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77.49°W
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