salutations celestial sight seers i'm david fuller with eyes on the sky what's up this week there's
an awesome planetary alignment happening over in the morning sky and i will share
with you not only how to see all the bright easy planets but the dim difficult ones and that's the
important part we want to be able to see all the planets right so let's start with where and when
we will be looking in the southeastern part of the sky in general even though we're going to look
all the way from east northeast through south but generally facing towards the southeast you should
be able to see everything in your visual field of view jupiter is going to be very obvious nice
and high towards the southeast if you look down in the left towards the eastern part of the sky
venus will be nice and brilliant between them will be the moon and uh the moon will be over
there depending on what morning you are looking as well it's gonna slide this direction i'll do more
on that a little bit later and then all the way towards the south if you follow the line of venus
mars jupiter all the way out towards the south you can also spot where saturn is at
those are the easy ones those are fairly bright the dimmest one is saturn at like magnitude you
know one or zero it's it's pretty bright shouldn't be difficult to find at all the difficult one to
see uh as far as the naked eye planets is gonna be mercury and that is because it's perpetually stuck
in twilight as i like to say it's kind of at its best it's caught between darkness and twilight and
there's a golden 15 minutes that you can really see it at its best whether it's in the evening
sky or the morning sky and that happens to be that 30 to 45 minutes uh either before sunrise or
after sunset that mercury is really high enough up to be able to see it and also bright enough
uh then and the sky is dark enough that you have enough contrast to be able to spot that little
quick moving innermost planet that is really kind of the challenging one unfortunately we have
jupiter mars the moon and venus to point right the way towards where it's at but the timing is very
important so for me i'm gonna be out at about 4 35 in the morning on friday morning because that's 45
minutes before my local sunrise and as you watch what happens over the next 15 minutes it rises up
it actually goes for me from about four degrees up which is really difficult to see because there's
a lot of atmosphere it's going through all the way up to seven degrees which actually kind of
gets it up and above a little bit more of that atmosphere making it simpler to see however you
can see how the sky starts to get brighter so you start to lose it there's really kind of a
maybe you know you want to be looking kind of that whole time not directly at it necessarily
every single minute of that but definitely keep looking back every minute or two to see if you
can spot where that innermost planet is if you are having trouble and don't don't see it naked eye
and you're getting towards that you know half hour before sunrise time not to worry again follow your
line start at venus and bring out some binoculars and that will help you spot it the planet is a
little more than a field of view and a half from venus so if you start at venus and head towards
where the sun will rise obviously don't use the binoculars after the sun has risen but if you head
towards that direction you should be able to spot mercury however one thing i do want to point out
is if we look right here and zoom in there is a star there too that's around the same magnitude
so mercury is going to be the higher one it should be a little brighter but mercury is definitely the
one that's going to be up and to the left so just don't confuse the star that happens to be lower
it's also going to be that star is going to be through more atmospheres should be more difficult
to see and mercury should be the one that you spot first anyway that's how you find where mercury is
now if we want to find where uranus is at we have to kind of get rid of where the moon is going
to be for us so that we can there we go there's uranus hiding over here like that it is part way
between venus and mars uh the moon will be kind of past it on either side on the 24th and 25th so
that actually could cause a problem if there's a little bit of additional light
over there that way but if you want to try to find it i'm going to back up to that 45 minutes before
because that gives us a little bit more darkness that's actually a better time
to try to be looking for it so if you spot mercury early or if you can't see mercury right away
you can start looking for this instead notice this star over here that is a 2.5 magnitude star known
as mencar in the constellation of cetus it forms a pretty good triangle here with venus and the moon
or excuse me venus and uranus and we are then able to hopefully find where that planet is by
getting some of this other stuff out of the way because it kind of blocks it so we can
use this star right here which will be in the same field of view as this 2.5 magnitude
star so you can literally just kind of like look from venus across the horizon like that and then
if we use our binoculars and we head up there's that other star both in the
same field of view even if you've got a five degree field of view with some 10
by 50 binoculars you should be able to get both in there follow that same line upward
in this direction like this and what you're going to not see first is necessarily where
uranus is but you might see these two stars which point right at the planet so if you
go past uranus that's fine see those two stars right next to each other and go aha i found them
they should be almost the same magnitude as uranus boom head right back to it just don't confuse it
with these two stars which are further apart but if you follow that line again it's about
a field of view and a half to two fields of view as you head over that way you should
be able to find where the seventh planet in the solar system is now to find where neptune is at
that's the tricky one because the sun is rising it is not as bright as uranus is
it is an eighth magnitude object so as we zoom in over here there's neptune if you look for
the line that jupiter and saturn form here like that neptune is on that line
so you're not actually going to go all the way across that way but what we are going to do is
imagine that line by starting at jupiter with our binoculars or if binoculars are not enough oomph
then you may want to use your finder scope on a telescope because it should have the
same field of view as binoculars and then head over in that direction towards where saturn is
and we're going to notice that there's a pattern in the sky
that is kind of like a hockey stick like this so there's four stars they're all kind of
equal brightness you'll also notice that there's these two stars down here that form this little
quadrilateral thing so this is not difficult to identify once you've found that you're going to
go ah i found the hockey stick oh yes so remember this line because we're going to follow that line
as we go up the hockey stick like this we're going to follow that now we're going to go that
bottom of the hockey stick line like this over here there's a star right there that is almost
exactly the same magnitude as neptune and neptune is right above it right there it is not bright
it is an object that is 7.8 magnitude this star right here is just a hair brighter at
7.3 magnitude about a half magnitude brighter but if you can see the star you might be able to pick
out neptune what's interesting about neptune is that it really does look blue it's not like a blue
white star i mean it really does look blue it also looks very small in binoculars so you may not pick
up that color and that's okay but if you're using a large enough telescope you should be able to see
that blue color especially if this telescope is larger because it's really kind of obvious the
one thing again you're gonna be fighting is that you know brightening of the twilight morning so
you might need to do this over a morning or two to be able to see both the outer planets and mercury
especially if you're trying to use a telescope to be able to see where neptune is
but the great thing about neptune is you can get up earlier and look for that first and then kind
of work your way down and then look for mercury last you don't necessarily have to go in the order
that i did however there's a bonus and the bonus is that i talked about earlier the moon
so if we bring up our date here again we can see on the 23rd the moon is close to mars it
kind of splits that difference on the 24th that's what i'm going to be looking on friday morning
it gets close to venus on the 25th and it's really close on the 26th now what happens on the 27th is
it's near mercury but it's also really really really small if we zoom in look how thin that
crescent is that's an old moon right there even if we go back to the 26th that's a pretty old moon
and not much of a crescent either but on the 27th that's not a lot you might actually use mercury to
find the moon on that day so anyway that is your guide on how to find all eight planets and i know
you're thinking wait dave you only talked about seven because you did mercury venus mars jupiter
saturn uranus neptune but all you gotta do is look down at your feet and you can see the eighth
planet which is the planet earth and i would be remiss if i did not say that i still think
pluto is a planet so there should be nine but the international astronomical union decided otherwise
despite the fact that i think their criteria doesn't make any sense and so pluto should
be a planet but in any case of the eight major planets that are still technically in existence
you can see all of them this week and weekend if you have some clear skies and a really low horizon
to catch mercury i encourage you to do it it's fun and even if you're tired it's totally worth it
so get out there and do it i'm david fuller with eyes on the sky wishing you clear and dark skies