Tuesday, June 26, 2007

don't forget jupiter!

tomorrow night, wednesday, june 27, we'll be treated to another planetary, star, and moon line-up! completely different than last week's alignment, this time around we see the moon, the star antares and then planet jupiter in a nice line across the south-southwest sky! use a telescope or binoculars to try to find jupiter's 4 brightest moons! for details about viewing other objects in the sky this week go visit universe today!

and dont forget to keep your eyes up for the impending extreme pairing of super bright venus and saturn. they've been approaching each other in the sky all month to reach their closest appearance in our sky sunday night....


the dots represent the movement of each planet over 5 day periods from jun 1st to july 1st. saturn is farther from us than venus so from our perspective it moves slower than venus yet faster than all the other stars in the background sky that are many many many times farther away! this sunday, july 1st, these planets will appear 0.7 degrees apart from each other on the sky (just a little farther apart than the moon looks wide!). you should be able to see both at once with most telescopes!

after sunday, saturn will lose visibility as is moves near the sun's glare. venus will reach its peak brightness on july 12th.

the above image comes from starry night.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Been watching Saturn, it is so freaking bright and pretty. Too bad it will lose that luster.