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 M44

Dominic Ford, Editor
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The sky at

The Moon and M44 will make a close approach, passing within a mere 39.8 arcminutes of each other. The Moon will be 22 days old.

From Cambridge , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 23:26 (EST) and reaching an altitude of 66° above the southern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:10.

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 -12.0; and M44 will be at mag 3.1. Both objects will lie in the constellation Cancer.

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 M44 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 08h39m50s 19°01'N Cancer -12.0 32'15"6
M44 08h40m20s 19°40'N Cancer 3.1 108'36"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 90° from the Sun, which is in Libra at this time of year.

The sky on 31 Oct 2018

The sky on 31 October 2018
Sunrise
07:14
Sunset
17:39
Twilight ends
19:14
Twilight begins
05:39

22-day old moon
Waning Crescent

44%

22 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 09:21 13:54 18:28
Venus 06:46 11:48 16:49
Moon 23:02 06:32 13:56
Mars 14:39 19:39 00:38
Jupiter 08:58 13:48 18:38
Saturn 11:50 16:24 20:57
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.

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

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

42.38°N
71.11°W
EST

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