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 48.7 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 24 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 12° above the horizon at dawn.

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The Moon will be at mag -11.3; and Uranus will be at mag 5.9. Both objects will lie in the constellation Capricornus.

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 21h13m40s 15°52'S Capricornus -11.3 30'54"0
Uranus 21h15m00s 16°37'S Capricornus 5.9 3"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 64° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 22 Nov 2024

The sky on 22 November 2024
Sunrise
06:47
Sunset
16:28
Twilight ends
18:05
Twilight begins
05:10

21-day old moon
Waning Crescent

46%

21 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:40 13:06 17:32
Venus 10:13 14:39 19:06
Moon 22:16 05:32 12:36
Mars 20:52 04:15 11:38
Jupiter 17:26 00:53 08:20
Saturn 13:09 18:41 00:13
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

19 Oct 2082  –  Uranus ends retrograde motion
22 May 2083  –  Uranus enters retrograde motion
08 Aug 2083  –  Uranus at opposition
23 Oct 2083  –  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
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