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 19.3 arcminutes of each other. The Moon will be 7 days old.

From Cambridge , the pair will become visible at around 21:06 (EST), 46° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting at 01:30.

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 -11.7; and M44 will be at mag 3.1. Both objects will lie in the constellation Cancer.

They will be close enough to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will also 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 08h40m30s 19°59'N Cancer -11.7 32'10"0
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 77° from the Sun, which is in Aries at this time of year.

The sky on 10 May 2019

The sky on 10 May 2019
Sunrise
05:26
Sunset
19:53
Twilight ends
21:48
Twilight begins
03:32

6-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

44%

6 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:02 11:52 18:42
Venus 04:31 11:03 17:34
Moon 10:26 18:00 01:28
Mars 07:32 15:14 22:56
Jupiter 22:27 03:01 07:35
Saturn 00:20 04:59 09:39
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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