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 M45

Dominic Ford, Editor
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The sky at

The Moon and M45 will make a close approach, passing within a mere 34.2 arcminutes of each other. The Moon will be 2 days old.

From Cambridge however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 10° above the horizon at dusk.

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The Moon will be at mag -9.2; and M45 will be at mag 1.3. Both objects will lie in the constellation Taurus.

They will be a little too widely separated to fit comfortably within the field of view of a telescope, but will be visible to the naked eye or through a pair of binoculars.

A graph of the angular separation between the Moon and M45 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 03h46m50s 24°39'N Taurus -9.2 33'12"5
M45 03h47m30s 24°06'N Taurus 1.3 110'00"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 21° from the Sun, which is in Aries at this time of year.

The sky on 29 Apr 2025

The sky on 29 April 2025
Sunrise
05:39
Sunset
19:41
Twilight ends
21:30
Twilight begins
03:51

2-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

5%

2 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:54 11:06 17:19
Venus 04:01 10:07 16:13
Moon 06:34 14:29 22:35
Mars 11:15 18:41 02:07
Jupiter 07:58 15:32 23:06
Saturn 04:14 10:06 15:59
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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Cambridge

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42.38°N
71.11°W
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