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 sky at

The Moon's monthly orbit around the Earth will carry it to its closest point to the Sun – its perihelion – at a distance of 0.9830 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 0.9856 AU from the Sun, and the Moon will lie at a distance of 0.9830 AU from the Sun.

This distance between the Earth and Moon will be 0.0027 AU (405,000 km).

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

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Angular Size
The Moon 20h00m10s 20°41'S Sagittarius 29'28"
Sun (centre) 21h05m 16°37'S Capricornus 32'27"

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0.

The sky on 3 Feb 2019

The sky on 3 February 2019
Sunrise
06:54
Sunset
17:00
Twilight ends
18:36
Twilight begins
05:18

28-day old moon
Waning Crescent

0%

28 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:16 12:12 17:09
Venus 04:06 08:48 13:29
Moon 06:20 11:04 15:50
Mars 09:35 16:11 22:48
Jupiter 03:22 07:58 12:34
Saturn 05:18 09:55 14:31
All times shown in EST.

Warning

Never attempt to point a pair of binoculars or a telescope at an object close to the Sun. Doing so may result in immediate and permanent blindness.

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

27 Jan 2019  –  Moon at Last Quarter
04 Feb 2019  –  New Moon
12 Feb 2019  –  Moon at First Quarter
19 Feb 2019  –  Full Moon

Image credit

Simulated image courtesy of Tom Ruen.

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42.38°N
71.11°W
EST

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