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 Moon's monthly orbit around the Earth will carry it to its furthest point from the Sun – its aphelion – at a distance of 0.9980 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 0.9958 AU from the Sun, and the Moon will lie at a distance of 0.9980 AU from the Sun.

This distance between the Earth and Moon will be 0.0025 AU (373,000 km).

The positions of the Sun and Moon in the sky will be:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Angular Size
The Moon 13h48m20s 8°51'S Virgo 31'58"
Sun (centre) 23h58m 0°09'S Pisces 32'07"

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0.

The sky on 20 Mar 2022

The sky on 20 March 2022
Sunrise
07:11
Sunset
19:21
Twilight ends
20:51
Twilight begins
05:42

18-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

90%

18 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:54 12:34 18:14
Venus 05:04 10:17 15:30
Moon 21:00 02:53 08:36
Mars 05:10 10:10 15:10
Jupiter 06:50 12:35 18:20
Saturn 05:39 10:50 16:01
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.

Related news

18 Mar 2022  –  Full Moon
25 Mar 2022  –  Moon at Last Quarter
01 Apr 2022  –  New Moon
09 Apr 2022  –  Moon at First Quarter

Image credit

Simulated image courtesy of Tom Ruen.

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