Simulated image courtesy of Tom Ruen.

The Moon at perihelion

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Moon feed

Objects: The Moon
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The sky at

The Moon's monthly orbit around the Earth will carry it to its closest point to the Sun – its perihelion – at a distance of 0.9945 AU from the Sun.

This happens at around the time when the Moon's orbit carries it between the Sun and the Earth, at around the same time that it passes new moon.

At the moment of the Moon's perihelion, the Earth will lie at a distance of 0.9968 AU from the Sun, and the Moon will lie at a distance of 0.9945 AU from the Sun.

This distance between the Earth and Moon will be 0.0026 AU (388,000 km).

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

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Angular Size
The Moon 15h18m30s 20°52'S Libra 30'43"
Sun (centre) 13h26m 9°03'S Virgo 32'05"

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0.

The sky on 17 Oct 2023

The sky on 17 October 2023
Sunrise
07:18
Sunset
18:28
Twilight ends
19:57
Twilight begins
05:49

3-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

9%

3 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:10 12:48 18:27
Venus 03:32 10:01 16:31
Moon 10:18 15:11 19:58
Mars 08:09 13:31 18:52
Jupiter 19:18 02:09 08:59
Saturn 16:17 21:37 02:57
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

14 Oct 2023  –  New Moon
21 Oct 2023  –  Moon at First Quarter
28 Oct 2023  –  Full Moon
05 Nov 2023  –  Moon at Last Quarter

Image credit

Simulated image courtesy of Tom Ruen.

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