Planets light up night sky over county
All but one of the visible planets are available in the evening sky over Butler County during the next several weeks. Venus is still shining brightly in the early morning sky just before sunrise; but Jupiter, Saturn, Mars and Mercury are working the evening sky and the new crescent moon will make it easy to find three of the four early this week.
Mercury, Mars, and Saturn will receive a nice celestial hug. In more formal astronomical terms, there will be some nice conjunctions between the moon and those three planets.
By far, the brightest of the four planets in the evening is Jupiter. Right now it's the brightest star-like object in the sky, rising majestically in the east.
This month, Jupiter is the closest it will be to Earth this year, just under 419 million miles away. You can't miss it in the eastern heavens, and you will certainly want to shoot a view its way with a telescope or even a decent pair of binoculars. You'll see the disk of the great 88,000-mile diameter planet, and if you have strong enough optics you'll also be able to see the diagonal stripe across the planet, especially along Jupiter's equator.
What you're seeing are Jupiter's brightest cloud bands that are a part of its very violent atmosphere, complete with raging storms, lightning, and winds at hundreds of miles per hour.
You may want to wait until later in the evening to get a close up look at Jupiter, especially after 11 p.m. when it's higher in the sky and its light doesn't have to cut through as much of Earth's blurring atmosphere. But even in the early evening you'll see up to 4 of Jupiter's brightest moons that line up on either side of great planet. They look like little stars that are orbiting Jupiter in periods of two to 17 days.
The other three planets are all in the western sky and will have close encounters with the new crescent moon.
The most challenging planet to see will be Mercury, the closest planet to the sun and one of the smallest at a diameter of 3,000 miles.
If it's clear Sunday night between 8:30 and 9 p.m. and you can get to a place where you have an unobstructed view of the northwestern horizon, look for a very thin crescent moon very low in the sky. Just below it will be the planet Mercury, now 114 million miles from Earth. You might have to scan that part of the sky with binoculars to see the closest planet to the sun. Make sure you look before 9 p.m., because shortly after that time both the moon and Mercury will set.
This Tuesday night it will be much easier to see the celestial hugging between the fatter crescent moon and Mars. The best time to see this conjunction will be between 9 and 10 p.m.
Mars will be the reddish looking "star" just to the right of the moon. This should be a really lovely sight because you'll probably see Earthshine on the crescent moon. That's when you not only see the bright crescent of the moon, but you'll also see the rest of the moon's disk bathed in the pale light of second-hand sunshine bouncing off the earth and then on to the moon.
I wouldn't bother all that much trying to view Mars with a telescope. Right now, 4,000 mile-wide Mars is about as far away from the Earth as it can get, about 200 million miles away. Mars will have another close encounter with the Earth late next year.
Incidentally, those two bright stars to the right of the moon Tuesday night are Castor and Pollux, the brightest stars in the constellation Gemini the Twins, as seen in the diagram.
On Wednesday night, you definitely want to shoot your telescope at the Moon and the wonder planet Saturn, poised just below the moon. Even with the naked eye this will be a sight to behold, but with a telescope you can sweep across the craters, mountains and dark maria, or plains, of the moon. You especially want to check out the curved line between the sunlit and darkened part of the moon, called the terminator, and it's not named after Arnold Schwarzenegger!
Along the terminator, the sun is rising over the lunar horizon and you can see more details of the mountains and crater walls with the long lunar shadows.
Then pan your telescope at Saturn. It's simply wonderful, with a 136,000 mile-wide ring system and an array of surrounding moons, including it's largest moon Titan, larger than the planet Mercury. Despite the fact that Saturn is nearly 895 million away and starting to creep into the haze as it draws closer and closer to the western horizon, it's still one of the best things you'll ever see through the eyepiece of your telescope.
Mike Lynch is an amateur astronomer and professional broadcast meteorologist for WCCO Radio in Minneapolis and author of the new book, "Pennsylvania Starwatch," available at bookstores and at his Web site www.lynchandthestars.com
