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 33.4 arcminutes of each other. The Moon will be 27 days old.

From Ashburn however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 13° above the horizon at dawn.

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The Moon will be at mag -9.6; 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 08h40m40s 20°13'N Cancer -9.6 33'01"9
M44 08h40m20s 19°40'N Cancer 3.1 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 27° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 28 Aug 2019

The sky on 28 August 2019
Sunrise
06:32
Sunset
19:47
Twilight ends
21:22
Twilight begins
04:56

27-day old moon
Waning Crescent

3%

27 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:59 12:48 19:36
Venus 06:52 13:26 20:01
Moon 04:02 11:32 18:55
Mars 06:40 13:17 19:54
Jupiter 14:50 19:36 00:22
Saturn 16:57 21:42 02:27
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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Ashburn

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Longitude:
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39.04°N
77.49°W
EDT

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