Friday, January 31, 2020

Moon Enters Taurus

Tonight Eastern Standard Time, Moon passes from urgent Aries to keep plugging away Taurus.

That's Northern Hemisphere.  In Southern Hemisphere Moon currently appears on the descending stretch of the ecliptic, passing from Libra to Scorpio.

Remember not to confuse zodiac signs with constellations.  We will all, north and south, see Moon at end of constellation Pisces.  I put a blue mark in the screen shot of Pisces below to show approximate location of Moon and Uranus.  It's a blue bar crossing the ecliptic right after the 2 hour line.  The zodiac sign Aries goes from 0 hours to 2 hours.
Next is a screenshot from the astro.com ephemeris file (free!) showing Moon ingresses (sign changes).  I put a blue mark where it shows the GMT time for Moon entering Taurus.


Converting 00:28UT/GMT to East coast USA time we get 7:28pm Jan 31.


You can see Moon next to Uranus in upper right quadrant of the chart.  It is a little more than 2.5 degrees from Uranus. It will catch  up with the rolling planet about 5 hours later.

Can you see how the Moon and Uranus disappear under the horizon (horizontal line in chart) while Moon is overtaking big U?

Folks in Boise, ID with the right kind of telescope and clear skies might be able to see the lineup.


I go back and look at my posts after hitting the publish button and always find mistakes.  This morn I fixed 2 faulty links in yesterday's post.