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 1°12' of each other. The Moon will be 24 days old.

From Cambridge , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 23:47 (EST) and reaching an altitude of 53° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 04:52.

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 -11.6; and M45 will be at mag 1.3. Both objects will lie in the constellation Taurus.

They will be too widely separated to fit 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 03h46m20s 25°17'N Taurus -11.6 32'20"9
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 74° from the Sun, which is in Cancer at this time of year.

The sky on 7 Aug 2026

The sky on 7 August 2026
Sunrise
05:40
Sunset
19:56
Twilight ends
21:48
Twilight begins
03:47

24-day old moon
Waning Crescent

31%

24 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:11 11:33 18:56
Venus 09:39 15:39 21:40
Moon 23:45 07:38 15:41
Mars 01:50 09:27 17:05
Jupiter 05:06 12:22 19:37
Saturn 22:22 04:37 10:52
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

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

42.38°N
71.11°W
EST

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