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 1°17' of each other. The Moon will be 17 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will be visible in the morning sky, becoming accessible around 19:31, when they reach an altitude of 16° above your eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 01:12, 68° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 06:09, 24° above your western horizon.

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 -12.8; and M44 will be at mag 3.1. Both objects will lie in the constellation Cancer.

They will be too widely separated to fit 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 08h41m20s 20°56'N Cancer -12.8 32'27"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 163° from the Sun, which is in Sagittarius at this time of year.

The sky on 11 Jan 2020

The sky on 11 January 2020
Sunrise
07:15
Sunset
16:43
Twilight ends
18:21
Twilight begins
05:37

16-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

96%

16 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:30 12:03 16:37
Venus 09:17 14:29 19:42
Moon 16:44 00:23 07:59
Mars 03:59 08:44 13:29
Jupiter 06:32 11:09 15:45
Saturn 07:24 12:06 16:49
All times shown in EST.

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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Fairfield

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Longitude:
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41.14°N
73.26°W
EST

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