This week in Skywatch I have a bit of celestial hodgepodge for you.

First off let me start with the moon. It's officially full this coming Sunday night and with the summer solstice only 10 days away, this will be the lowest full moon of the year.

What I mean by that is the moon will make a very low track across the sky as it rises in the southeast around sunset and sets in the southwest around sunrise.

The highest it will get will only be about 17 degrees above the southern horizon a little after 1:30 a.m. Monday. That's not even two of your fist widths at arm's length. If you're watching the moon from a valley it might not even make it above the tree tops.

Wherever you see the moon, it will be casting some long shadows all night long. In 1971, Cat Stevens sang about being followed by a moon shadow; tonight you'll be followed by an extra long moon shadow.

Since the full moon is always on the opposite side of the sky from the sun, the full moon follows nearly the same low path across the southern sky that the sun does around the time of the winter solstice, the first day of winter.

But because the moon's orbit around the Earth is inclined by five degrees to the Earth's orbit around the sun, the full moon is the lowest it has been in 18 years, and the lowest it will be until 2024.

Cat will be in his glory tonight!

As usual the full moon louses up what you can see in the night sky, but nonetheless there is some planet action going on in the west.

First off Mercury, the closest planet to the sun, is making its best evening appearance for 2006. Well, it's as good as Mercury can get.

Since Mercury is close to the sun at only 36 million miles away, and it only takes 88 days to go around our home star, it makes only brief and not so spectacular appearances. The planet never gets all that far away from the sun in our sky.

This sun-hugging planet is either seen briefly in the early morning twilight in the low eastern sky, or as we see it now, in the early evening twilight after sunset.

Look around 9:45 p.m. for a medium-bright star very low in the west-northwest sky.

Don't look too much later than that or Mercury will already be below the horizon. You'll need to have a low flat horizon to see it at all.

As you can see in the diagram, there will be two stars side by side a little above Mercury. Those stars are Castor and Pollux, the brightest stars in the constellation Gemini the Twins.

Looking with binoculars or a telescope at Mercury won't exactly make you say wow, because it's so low that we have to look through a lot of Earth's atmosphere. About all that you'll see is a fuzzy, reddish half disk. Mercury is a shy planet!

As long as you're looking in the low western sky, check out the ringed planet Saturn and the red planet Mars getting closer and closer to each other in the sky. Saturn's a little higher than Mercury in the low western sky. It will be the brightest starlike object to the upper left of Castor and Pollux.

Just to the lower right of Saturn will be Mars, which you can easily see with the naked eye.

Right now the two planets are within 5 degrees from each other and by next weekend they will only be 1 degree apart, or about two moon-lengths. You'll be easily able to fit them into the same field of view with binoculars.

With a good pair of binoculars or small telescope, you'll probably see Saturn's rings and some of its moons.

Around 10 p.m., when it's dark enough, you'll notice a cluster of stars through your binoculars in-between Saturn and Mars. That's the open cluster of distant stars called the Beehive cluster, and as Mars and Saturn draw closer together later next week, it will look like Mars is joining the Beehive.

Of course Mars, Saturn, and the Beehive cluster are nowhere near each other physically. They just happen to be in the same line of sight. Mars is 213 million miles away from Earth, Saturn is more than 910 million miles distant, and the Beehive Cluster is an amazing 2,900 trillion miles from our backyards!

Mike Lynch is an amateur astronomer and professional broadcast meteorologist for WCCO Radio on Minneapolis and author of the new book. "Pennsylvania Starwatch," available at bookstores and at his Web site www.lynchandthestars.com