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
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse
Please wait
Loading 0/4
Click and drag to rotate
Mouse wheel to zoom in/out
Touch with mouse to dismiss
The sky at

The Moon and M45 will make a close approach, passing within a mere 16.0 arcminutes of each other. The Moon will be 4 days old.

From Ashburn , the pair will become visible at around 20:12 (EDT), 39° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting at 23:51.

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 -10.8; and M45 will be at mag 1.3. Both objects will lie in the constellation Taurus.

They will be close enough to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will also 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 03h47m10s 24°22'N Taurus -10.8 30'42"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 50° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 30 Mar 2028

The sky on 30 March 2028
Sunrise
06:54
Sunset
19:31
Twilight ends
21:02
Twilight begins
05:23

4-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

22%

4 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:37 12:31 18:25
Venus 08:42 16:05 23:28
Moon 08:56 16:39 00:28
Mars 06:55 13:06 19:17
Jupiter 17:42 00:03 06:23
Saturn 07:50 14:22 20:53
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.

Share

Ashburn

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

39.04°N
77.49°W
EDT

Color scheme