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 31.7 arcminutes of each other. The Moon will be 14 days old.

From Ashburn , the pair will be visible in the evening sky, becoming accessible around 17:31 (EDT), 25° above your eastern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 22:34, 75° above your southern horizon. They will continue to be observable until around 04:47, when they sink below 12° above your western horizon.

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 -12.7; 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 03h47m00s 24°37'N Taurus -12.7 31'54"3
M45 03h47m30s 24°06'N Taurus 1.3 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 159° from the Sun, which is in Ophiuchus at this time of year.

The sky on 11 Dec 2027

The sky on 11 December 2027
Sunrise
07:16
Sunset
16:46
Twilight ends
18:22
Twilight begins
05:39

13-day old moon
Waxing Gibbous

98%

13 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:22 12:00 16:38
Venus 09:35 14:15 18:54
Moon 14:50 22:31 06:20
Mars 09:01 13:40 18:19
Jupiter 00:23 06:35 12:47
Saturn 13:47 20:08 02:29
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.

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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Ashburn

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Longitude:
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39.04°N
77.49°W
EDT

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