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 19.0 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 Cambridge , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 01:11 (EDT) – 3 hours and 50 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 25° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 03:32.

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The Moon will be at mag -11.5; and Uranus will be at mag 5.9. Both objects will lie in the constellation Pisces.

They will be close enough to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will also 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 00h59m10s 5°56'N Pisces -11.5 30'35"9
Uranus 00h59m40s 5°39'N Pisces 5.9 3"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 75° from the Sun, which is in Gemini at this time of year.

The sky on 5 Jul 2024

The sky on 5 July 2024
Sunrise
05:11
Sunset
20:23
Twilight ends
22:35
Twilight begins
02:58

29-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

0%

29 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:54 14:18 21:41
Venus 05:51 13:24 20:57
Moon 04:17 12:35 20:48
Mars 01:48 08:55 16:01
Jupiter 02:51 10:17 17:43
Saturn 23:31 05:11 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.

Related news

18 Dec 2097  –  Uranus ends retrograde motion
22 Jul 2098  –  Uranus enters retrograde motion
08 Oct 2098  –  Uranus at opposition
22 Dec 2098  –  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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Cambridge

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Longitude:
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42.38°N
71.11°W
EDT

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