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 Uranus

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse
Please wait
Loading 0/4
Click and drag to rotate
Mouse wheel to zoom in/out
Touch with mouse to dismiss
The sky at

The Moon and Uranus will make a close approach, passing within a mere 46.3 arcminutes of each other. From some parts of the world, the Moon will pass in front of Uranus, creating a lunar occultation. The Moon will be 5 days old.

From Ashburn , the pair will become visible at around 19:11 (EDT), 38° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting at 22:37.

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 -10.9; and Uranus will be at mag 5.8. Both objects will lie in the constellation Aries.

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 Uranus 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 02h37m50s 14°12'N Aries -10.9 30'09"7
Uranus 02h36m30s 14°54'N Aries 5.8 3"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 55° from the Sun, which is in Aquarius at this time of year.

The sky on 7 Mar 2022

The sky on 7 March 2022
Sunrise
06:31
Sunset
18:08
Twilight ends
19:37
Twilight begins
05:03

5-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

25%

5 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:50 11:04 16:18
Venus 04:11 09:18 14:25
Moon 09:08 16:13 23:29
Mars 04:30 09:21 14:12
Jupiter 06:34 12:15 17:56
Saturn 05:26 10:36 15:46
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.

Related news

18 Jan 2022  –  Uranus ends retrograde motion
24 Aug 2022  –  Uranus enters retrograde motion
09 Nov 2022  –  Uranus at opposition
22 Jan 2023  –  Uranus ends retrograde motion

Image credit

The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.

Share

Ashburn

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

39.04°N
77.49°W
EDT

Color scheme