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 Uranus

Dominic Ford, Editor
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The sky at

The Moon and Uranus will make a close approach, passing within a mere 40.6 arcminutes of each other. From some parts of the world, the Moon will pass in front of Uranus, creating a lunar occultation. The Moon will be 4 days old.

From Fairfield however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 19° above the horizon at dusk.

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 -11.1; and Uranus will be at mag 5.5. Both objects will lie in the constellation Leo.

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

A graph of the angular separation between the Moon and Uranus 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 09h41m50s 13°50'N Leo -11.1 32'42"3
Uranus 09h43m00s 14°27'N Leo 5.5 3"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 55° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 28 Jun 2024

The sky on 28 June 2024
Sunrise
05:20
Sunset
20:29
Twilight ends
22:37
Twilight begins
03:12

22-day old moon
Waning Crescent

42%

22 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:30 14:03 21:35
Venus 05:50 13:23 20:56
Moon 00:24 06:28 12:44
Mars 02:13 09:11 16:09
Jupiter 03:25 10:47 18:08
Saturn 00:06 05:48 11:29
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.

Related news

29 Apr 2045  –  Uranus ends retrograde motion
06 Dec 2045  –  Uranus enters retrograde motion
17 Feb 2046  –  Uranus at opposition
04 May 2046  –  Uranus ends retrograde motion

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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Fairfield

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41.14°N
73.26°W
EDT

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