You can see 4 close in sky

How would you like to take 10-by-50 binoculars and see four planets of our solar system in nearly the same field of view?

Over the next several mornings that will be possible in our Butler skies, especially this coming Wednesday, but these planets will be hugging really close most of this week. Jupiter, Venus, Mercury and Mars will all be within about six degrees of each other. That’s less than the width of your fist held at arm’s length. It’s the best conjunction of planets we’ll have in 2011, what I like to call a celestial group hugging.

Unfortunately, it’s not available at the most convenient time. You have to be up and around by 5:15 a.m. That’s because the planet cluster doesn’t rise in the east-northeastern sky earlier than that, and if you wait much past 5:45, you’ll lose the gang of four in the glare of the late morning twilight as the sun rises before 6:15 a.m.

You don’t have much of a window of time to spot the jam of planets and you also need to view them from a place that has a low flat treeless horizon.

Now, realistically, some might be saying the heck with this… I need my sleep! But some of you may have to be up that early anyway to get to work or school on time, and even if you don’t, it’s still something that’s great to experience.

Independent of the four-way planet conjunction, I highly recommend you watch the magic of the changing sky and the sounds of nature (along with the building traffic) as the sun approaches the horizon. This planet conjunction is a good excuse to take in one of the best free shows around.

Getting back to the actual conjunction of the four planets, their close encounter with each other in the sky has to do with all of the planets being in the right place at the right time. It also has to do with the fact that all of the major planets in our solar system orbit the sun in nearly the same orbital plane.

That is to say if you were to greatly shrink the solar system down to the size of your dining room table, it would pretty much lay flat. Because of this, we often get conjunctions of the planets. Usually, it’s just two planets in a close celestial hug or sometimes three. Conjunctions of four planets like what we have now are pretty rare.

Now, of course, none of these planets are all that close together physically, but they appear to be close because they are in the same line of sight. It’s conjunctions like these that get some astrologers all excited. Some people who really don’t know what they’re talking about claim that the collective gravitational pull of all these planets may have devastating effects on the Earth. No worries, the effect is truly negligible.

When you’re out there in the early morning, clutching your coffee, the brightest of the four planets that you’ll see by far is Venus. It’s the closest of the quartet at 134 million miles away, but the main reason it shines so brightly is its very poisonous but very reflective cloud cover that really bounces a lot of sunlight our way.

The second brightest planet is Jupiter, just to the left of Venus, even though it’s the most distant at more than 500 million miles away. This is because it’s a huge planet more than 88,000 miles in girth, way bigger than any other in our system.

With a small telescope you’ll see Jupiter’s brightest moons that resemble tiny little stars on either side of Jupiter, and you may even see some of its darker cloud bands. Honestly though, you’ll be underwhelmed with what you see in the eyepiece for any of the planets. At best, you’ll have a really fuzzy image because along the horizon you have to look through a lot more of Earth’s blurring atmosphere.

Mercury, the smallest planet of our solar system family, lies below and a little to the right of Venus, and it’s third in brightness.

Forget about seeing any details on Mercury or Mars, found on the lower left side of the alignment. In fact, Mars will be a real challenge to spot as it’s half the size of our Earth and nearly 198 million miles away.

If looking at four planets close together at the crack of dawn doesn’t suit you, check out Saturn in the evening sky as soon as it’s dark enough.

It’s the brightest starlike object in the southeastern sky and through even a small telescope you can clearly see the ring system and at least some of its moons including Titan, which is actually larger than the planet Mercury. Saturn is out all night long as it roves from the southeastern to southwestern sky. Saturn is a must see!

Mike Lynch is an amateur astronomer and professional broadcast meteorologist for WCCO Radio in Minneapolis and is author of the book, “Pennsylvania Starwatch,” available at bookstores and at his website www.lynchandthestars.com