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
 
