salutations celestial sight seers I'm David fuller welcome to eyes on the sky
what's up this week well actually over the next couple of weeks there's a lot
happening over in the morning part of the sky with the planets so if you look
towards the southeastern part of the sky if you're in the northern hemisphere
around about an hour before the Sun rises it peeks above the horizon we've
got three major planets all lined up in a row starting on the 7th of March about
equidistant from each other there's Mars that's the highest then there's Jupiter
in the middle and then Saturn is lowest closest to the horizon I do want to
point out that these are not necessarily well placed right now in terms of how
large they will appear in a telescope that's not to say that you can't look at
them through a telescope but Mars for example is less than six arc seconds
across so that's pretty small Jupiter is about at its smallest at around
thirty-five arc seconds across and Saturn the disk of the planet is under
16 and with the Rings you're at 36 so fairly small not impossible to view Mars
may not be a whole lot to see you might see a polar cap but not a whole lot of
other detail however if you want to take photographs of the planets as they're
moving through the sky like this with some foreground objects or with a
landscape or whatever this would be a nice opportunity to be able to do that
that won't take up a lot of time either especially since we're still in some
cool weather and it is morning and some of us may be headed off to work so watch
what happens with these planets Mars is gonna be heading towards where Jupiter's
at over a number of days now we need to back up just a little bit in time so
we still say about an hour so before sunrise and as we start to get in towards
the next part of the following week these planets are really close I mean
initially they started out at about 15 degrees apart now we're within about 10
degrees by the 14th so one week and look what's happening over here
I think that the moon is now gonna come into play here so by the 17th we've got
the moon really close making a nice line in about 20 degrees or so so that would
be a good photograph opportunity probably the best one though is on the
18th because look at how close all of these are together I'm going to take off
the angular here and you can see how close all those are look at that
Jupiter Mars and the moon are within three degrees of each other so that's
binoculars visible easily and if you have a nice telephoto zoom lens you can
probably get all three of these because they're all within eight degrees eight
nine degrees of each other so a really good zoom lens is gonna capture all
three of these together and the moon is not too terribly bright shouldn't wash
it things out too much we're looking at a magnitude of minus 10 that's a lot
less than the minus 12.7 or so that can be at full moon so hopefully
that will help and not wash things out enormously and then as we go forward a
little bit more into the rest of that week we can see how the moon starts to
move that way now I do want to bring the time forward though cause look what's
starting to come up above the horizon then we've got mercury you might be able
to catch that that's really low it's gonna be let's see the azimuth is only 5
degrees above the horizon right there you might want to wait another few days
it's actually gonna kind of zoom up a little but the ecliptic line is somewhat
low along there at that particular time so mercury might be difficult to spot
but it is possible and you can use the planets that are higher up to help point
you at it because Jupiter and Saturn basically make a line pointing right
down that way just you're gonna need to look good from Saturn it will be about
30 degrees so you'll probably have to kind of use the 15 degrees like this put
together and held apart and you can measure down there and might be able to
catch that just before the Sun pops up but before then there's a lot of planets
stuff happening if you are up early and I would encourage you to do so
check these out especially that 18th that's just a beautiful grouping of
planets and our satellite over there in the morning sky and if you do happen to
look over in the evening sky Venus is super bright super high right now that's
another great area for you to take a look if you're just looking for planets
and want to take a look at some things for a naked eye view of the night sky
that's all for this week keep your eyes on the sky and your outdoor lights aimed
down so we can all see what's up I'm David fuller wishing you clear and
dark skies