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 1.0071 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 1.0050 AU from the Sun, and the Moon will lie at a distance of 1.0071 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 16h16m40s 17°41'S Scorpius 31'22"
Sun (centre) 01h57m 11°57'N Aries 31'49"

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0.

The sky on 21 Apr 2019

The sky on 21 April 2019
Sunrise
06:10
Sunset
19:22
Twilight ends
20:50
Twilight begins
04:42

16-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

88%

16 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:13 11:15 17:17
Venus 04:56 10:56 16:57
Moon 20:56 02:30 07:59
Mars 08:31 15:39 22:47
Jupiter 23:24 04:25 09:25
Saturn 01:14 06:18 11:22
All times shown in PDT.

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

19 Apr 2019  –  Full Moon
26 Apr 2019  –  Moon at Last Quarter
04 May 2019  –  New Moon
11 May 2019  –  Moon at First Quarter

Image credit

Simulated image courtesy of Tom Ruen.

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