See the moon meet Uranus in lunar eclipse tonight (November 8)
On Tuesday (November 8), Uranus will disappear from the night sky for a brief period as the moon passes in front of the distant and faint ice giant planet. The event is what astronomers call a lunar eclipse and will be visible from North America and parts of Asia.
The lunar eclipse will begin at 7:39 a.m. EST (1239 GMT) when: Uranus — the seventh planet of the sun– begins to disappear behind the moon. When the lunar eclipse begins, Uranus will be in the constellation of Aries and will have a right ascension of 02h57m00s and a declination of 16 degrees N, according to In the air (opens in new tab).
When the ice giant planet disappears behind the 14-day-old moon, Uranus will have a visual magnitude of 5.7. Uranus’s lunar eclipse on November 8 will not be visible in New York City.
Related: What time is the Blood Moon total lunar eclipse on November 8?
Like all lunar eclipses, the Uranus lunar eclipse will only be visible from a small portion of Earth’s surface. This is because the moon is closer to Earth than other objects in the night sky like Uranus. The proximity is close enough to mean that the moon’s position in the sky depends on where on the Earth’s surface an observer is located.
As a result, while some skywatchers view the moon covering Uranus and obscuring the ice giant, observers in other locations will see the pair separated by as much as two degrees, which is more than four times the moon’s diameter in the sky. .
This means that even where the occultation is not visible, the moon is a good guide to spot Uranus in the sky.
In some parts of the planet, the lunar eclipse will not be visible because Uranus is below the horizon at the time it occurs. In other parts of the planet where Uranus is above the horizon, the occultation may still be undetectable because the sky is too clear to be seen.
Skywatchers hoping to see the moon covering Uranus or the two-degree separation between the two will need binoculars to see the event and the planet.
As the third largest planet in the solar system after the gas giants Jupiterand Saturn, Uranus has a diameter four times that of Earth. As an ice giant world, at least 80% or more of Uranus’s mass is made up of an icy mix of water, methane and ammonia.
Despite being so large, Uranus is not as visible as the solar system’s gas giants due to its immense distance from Earth.
The ice giant is located an average of about 1.7 billion miles (2.8 billion kilometers) from our planet. As the two planets orbit the sun, they never get closer than about 1.6 billion miles (2.6 billion km), and at their farthest apart, Earth and Uranus are separated by 1.98 billion miles (3.2 billion miles).
Uranus is so far away from the sun that the planet is about 84 . takes Counth years to complete a job to the star.
Despite the fact that Uranus’ lunar eclipses are generally rare, the moon is hiding the ice giant in the night sky. The moon has eclipsed Uranus once a month somewhere on Earth since February this year, and this sequence will continue through the rest of 2022.
The next Uranus lunar eclipse will take place on December 5 and will again only be visible from certain areas of the planet.
Editor’s Note: If you take a photo of the moon and Uranus and would like to share it with the readers of Space.com, please send your photo(s), comments, and your name and location to [email protected]
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