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 sky at

The Moon's monthly orbit around the Earth will carry it to its furthest point from the Sun – its aphelion – at a distance of 0.9942 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 0.9920 AU from the Sun, and the Moon will lie at a distance of 0.9942 AU from the Sun.

This distance between the Earth and Moon will be 0.0026 AU (393,000 km).

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

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Angular Size
The Moon 12h57m10s 9°40'S Virgo 30'20"
Sun (centre) 23h05m 5°49'S Aquarius 32'14"

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0.

The sky on 5 Mar 2026

The sky on 5 March 2026
Sunrise
06:19
Sunset
17:47
Twilight ends
19:19
Twilight begins
04:47

16-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

89%

16 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:11 12:10 18:08
Venus 06:59 12:56 18:53
Moon 19:17 01:17 07:07
Mars 05:55 11:17 16:38
Jupiter 12:31 20:02 03:32
Saturn 07:10 13:09 19:08
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

03 Mar 2026  –  Full Moon
11 Mar 2026  –  Moon at Last Quarter
18 Mar 2026  –  New Moon
25 Mar 2026  –  Moon at First Quarter

Image credit

Simulated image courtesy of Tom Ruen.

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41.14°N
73.26°W
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