One of the best occultations of the Pleiades by the Moon transpires on the morning of the 20th.
There’s a good reason for sky watchers to set their alarms this coming Sunday morning. If skies are clear, viewers across most of North America will have a rare chance to see the waning crescent Moon occult (pass in front of) the Pleiades open star cluster.
The passage of the 24% illuminated waning crescent Moon through Messier 45 is centered on 11:02 Universal Time (UT)/7:02 AM EDT. The transit occurs in the predawn hours for northern Mexico, the central and western United States, along with western Canada and Alaska. A strip from the central U.S. East Coast running to the northwest through the Great Lakes region sees the event transition through the brightening dawn sky into sunrise. Only the U.S. northeast and the Canadian Maritimes sit this one out. The pair is 58 degrees west of the rising Sun during the event.
The occultation footprint for Sunday morning's event. Credit: Occult 4.2.
Based on your observing location, the Moon will make a leisurely pass through the ‘Seven Sisters’ of Atlas, Pleione, Alcyone, Merope, Electra, Maia, and Taygeta in quick succession. The brightest of the Pleiads is the blue-white giant star Alcyone, shining at magnitude +2.4. The Moon moves its own apparent diameter (half an angular degree or 30 arc-minutes) about once an hour, and its bright limb leads the way during waning phase. This means that it will be easier to see the +3rd magnitude stars reappear from behind the dark nighttime limb of the Moon, versus seeing the initial ingress on the dazzling daytime side.
The sped up passage of the Moon through the Pleiades Sunday morning, as seen from Virginia Beach. Credit: Stellarium.
We’re currently in a cycle of occultations of the Pleiades by the Moon, which started in 2023 and runs all the way out until 2029. The Moon only ventures far enough away from the ecliptic plane to cover the Pleiades about once every generation, as the Moon passes what’s known as a Major Lunar Standstill as happened in 2025.
This passage of the ‘Long Nights Moon’ was important to the ancient peoples of the world as well. The famous Nebra star disk found in Germany dating from the Bronze Age (1800-1600 BC) seems to depict a similar pairing of the Moon with the Pleiades, long ago.
The Nebra Star Disk. Public Domain image.
Today, we know that the Pleiades are one of the closer star clusters to our solar system, hosting young stars 75-150 million years old at 444 light-years distant. Contrast that with the Moon photo-bombing the scene, only a light-second away!
The exact path of the Moon through the cluster will vary, owing to the parallax position of the Moon versus your site from north to south in the path. Use a planetarium program such as Stellarium to parse out individual ingress/egress times for stars in the cluster for your site. A crescent Moon offers a particularly photogenic view, as the nighttime side is lit by Earthshine. This is sunlight reflected back to the viewer from the lunar surface, courtesy of the gibbous Earth.
The Moon versus the Pleiades as seen on the evening of April 22, 2023 from Yuzhno-Morskoy (Primorsky Krai) in eastern Russia. Credit: Fillip Romanov.
Binoculars will offer a fine wide view of the celestial affair. Imaging the Moon versus the cluster, however, will be challenging, as the -9th magnitude Moon is over 10,000 times brighter than the individual stars in the Pleiades. There will be a ‘sweet spot’ in contrast as the sky brightens the scene at dawn, just before the rising Sun sweeps the Pleiades stars from view.
Cloud cover prospects over the CONUS for the morning of Sunday, July 20th. Credit: NWS/NOAA.
And this all occurs on the 56th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing, to boot. Don’t miss Sunday morning’s fine ‘Great North American Occultation’ of the Pleiades by the Moon, as one of the top celestial highlights of July 2025.
