For CG - Planet Triple Play: Saturn, Mars and Venus Appear Together

[knight_shadow]

If you live in the northern hemisphere, go out any night this week an hour or so after sunset and look at the western sky to catch a planetary triple play starring Venus, Saturn and Mars.


The first thing skywatchers will see — weather permitting — is the brilliant planet Venus, slightly north of west, in the constellation Gemini. Look for Gemini's twin first magnitude stars, Pollux and Castor, just above Venus.


As the sky gets darker, the planet Mars can be spotted to Venus' left as it appears in the constellation Leo very close to the bright, first magnitude star Regulus. Further still to the left will be Saturn shining in the western part of the constellation Virgo.


This sky map shows how to spot all three planets as they appear across a 71-degree angle in the night sky. For comparison, your closed fist held at arm's length covers about 5 degrees of arc in the sky.


Venus, Mars and Saturn are all currently appearing slightly north of the ecliptic, the path the sun appears to follow over the year, shown in green in the sky map.


link

[AZTheta]

It's just beautiful, have been watching the star show. Earlier this spring Mercury was visible for a week or so, but it's dipped below the horizon now.

The UofA has telescope parties; we have great views of the night sky. Thanks for the reminder, k_s.

[aephi alum]

Nice! I'll have to get out and see if I can see it. Unfortunately we've got some bad light pollution around here.

[epchick]

I'd love to see it, but I never know where any of those damn constellations are. They just look like a bunch of stars to me, I can never decipher them (except Orion).

[cheerfulgreek]

knight_shadow, you rock!

Yep. Last weekend I went up North where there are no city lights to distort the view, and of course I brought my telescope with me. I have a Celestron and an Orion. The Orion is much more powerful than the Celestron, so I'm able to see a lot. However, I didn't see the planets together, but I did see Saturn and Mars. Usually, I'm always looking for galaxies, as many as I can, or stars orbiting other stars. So I wasn't looking for the planets as much as I should've been. But that will change in the next month. You'll be surprised what you'll see with a really powerful telescope. It's just that so much of the universe appears to be one way but is really another that I wonder, at times, whether there's an ongoing conspiracy designed to embarrass astrophysicists.

Thank you so much for posting this, knight_shadow, that was so nice of you to do that. Thank you, and I'll keep my eyes/telescope on the look out.

[AGDee]

I will be up north two weeks from now. The last time I went, I was in Mackinaw City during the Perseid meteor showers and it was incredible!

A really good site to find out what you can see all the time is here:
http://stardate.org/
At 8:22 pm on WWJ (950 AM, Detroit radio station/all news) the Stardate folks are on and tell you what you can see that night.

[NinjaPoodle]

Thanks for posting this!

[AZTheta]

Bumping this b/c I just got in from planet-viewing and have to say "Holy Cow" - Venus is incredibly bright right now. The moon is waning, so the night sky is getting darker and darker. I hope that everyone, wherever you are, gets a chance to see these three planets this week. Actually the next several weeks will be excellent for viewing if you can get away from light pollution.

Other useful internet sites for star watching & information about the night sky include Abrams Planetarium (Michigan State University) , which publishes an easy to learn/follow monthly star calendar, reasonably priced(www.pa.msu.edu/abrams/SkyCalendar/) and McDonald University (UT Austin) which has a daily radio miniprogram (stardate.org) in addition to print materials (mcdonaldobservatory.org/). I also like Earth and Sky (earthsky.org)

(Astronomy was my favorite elective, next to physics, and it's actually not that hard to learn the various constellations. Scorpio is, of course, my favorite, not just because it's so easy to spot and so outrageously huge.)

[PrettyBoy]

I saw them a couple of hours ago. Interesting, but they looked like two stars rather than three planets. They looked like one big bright star with another smaller one on top of that, next to the moon. I'm sure it was the lights, but to me, they just looked liked any other star in the sky, when viewing them without any instruments. I still found it to be very interesting, though.

ETA: that would be cool if we could see them the same way planets look in some of the Sci Fi movies.

[cheerfulgreek]

I'm not sure if anyone knows, but Venus isn't the only planet, along with Saturn, and Mars that we can see with the unaided eye. You can also see two others. Out of the eight, we can actually see, Mercury, of course Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. Oh, and Earth, of course is also visible to the unaided eye. Just look down.

When I look at Venus and Mars, I always have my "wondering" questions. It's just that something bad happened on Venus and Mars. Looking at Mars and Venus makes me wonder if whatever happened there, could it happen here? I wonder, because we (human beings) have such a huge impact on the environment here, without much regard to long term consequenses. I mean, who even knew to ask these questions of our own planet before the study of Venus and Mars, our nearest neighbors in space, forced us to look back on ourselves? I dunno, I just think it's something we need to really think about.