Five Planets In The Morning Sky Produced by Marina Hansen and Billy Newman.
The Night Sky Podcast | Five Planets In The Morning Sky
Hello, and thank you for listening to this episode of the night sky podcast. My name is Billy Newman. And I’m Marina Hansen. And this week, we’re going to be talking about a few of the upcoming sky watching events that are going to be occurring in the night sky above us for the fourth week of January and part of the first week of February two.
Yeah, that’d be great. Yeah, the the five planets are visible right now. I think that’s probably our focus.
Yeah, it’s everyone’s focus. Anyone that’s been like covering the sky watching stuff that’s going on. Everybody’s talking about it. Because it’s such a cool rare event. It’s cool.
It is really cool. rare, but I was I was looking up some stuff for for before the show. And every every site has stuff about it, Huffington Post, National Geographic,
cool. I’m glad that it’s being covered so much. I saw a ton of tweets about it. And I try to post some stuff about it, too. I looked a few things up on the sky and telescope side, they always have a pretty good collection, or it’s pretty good and pretty secure and safe information to trust about what’s going on. And skywatching wise, yeah, they’re they’re normally pretty accurate. There’s, it’s often it’s difficult to be inaccurate. However, I’m often pretty inaccurate. But yeah, it’s exciting right now that the highlight right now is that the five planets are up and visible. We’ve had it for just about a week. Now, officially, I think that the mercury would be visible in the morning sky. Mercury’s one, like we’ve been talking about a little bit is like the the wildcard it’s the one that comes up last. And we’ll go first. Right? Because it’s so fast, it’s so quick to go around the sun.
And it is just now starting to be a lot more more visible. It’s brighter.
Yeah, this, this week is gonna be the prime week for viewing of the five planets. And it’s going to be really cool, too, because we’re going to have the moon in it also, as a crescent in the morning.
It’s going to be moving past all of them.
Yeah, yeah. So it’ll be able to see six of the the visible objects that are not stars in the sky all at one time. And then the sun is rises a little later. But yeah, this week is the week that we’re viewing and Mercury is going to be the easiest to do. And it’s really, I was looking at the arc of mercury as it as it kind of comes up into the orbit and its highest point in the sky is going to be February 5. And then after that, I think it starts to drop back off, it’ll fade back out. And it’s slower than it was like in the in the winter, at the end of December, when I had that really fast rise and set over like the course of two and a half weeks. In the night sky. This one’s going to be a little bit slower. And so Venus and Mercury are going to start drifting a little bit closer back toward the horizon line, again, closer back toward the sun. But I think mercury will get there first. Maybe at the end of February. Yeah, maybe it’s a downer. There’s a threshold there. I kind of had my note on about February 23 would be the last date that you’d be able to see mercury. But I bet technically, you could be able to observe it before then. I’m not sure though.
Yeah, that seems about right. I think it’s roughly a month of time that we have that they’re supposed to be all around and potentially visible. Yeah. But yeah, another cool thing about mercury coming up, like you’re saying, and it’s going to be most visible around the six, it’s also going to be closest to Venus, then it’s going to be like five degrees apart. I think it’s eight degrees apart right now. Oh, wow. Cool. But that’s going to be the closest that they’re going to be together during this time.
Yeah, that’s really cool. And that’ll make it a lot easier to observe too. Because that’s the difficult thing is you always kind of get lost out in the sea of it, when you’re trying to pinpoint mercury in it really hard to find is such a small thing. And if there’s not some other kind of large object to sort of anchor anchor yourself to first when you’re trying to find it in the sky, it’s kind of difficult to figure out where it’s going to be, if you just know it’s somewhere out there before the horizon, but you’re not sure maybe it’s set already. So that can be kind of tricky sometimes especially in the morning Twilight because it’s not all just dark sky. It’s not all visible night sky. It’s that kind of threshold in the morning. So you see a lot of that mist and haze that’s on the horizon line. It’s really difficult to tell if you can really see the clear sky behind it or if you’re looking at smog or haze or dust or something. Yeah, it can be pretty difficult for viewing. Yeah, but this week will definitely be the best I think it’s going to be really cool to to try and do it we’ve been kind of stuck with cloudy weather every morning, which is kind of frustrating. I haven’t seen mercury get out of it as you know the other four but it’s gonna be really cool. This week is going to be the best one to do. It’s in primetime now. So I think from the from January 30 to February 5 is going to be the prime To be able to view mercury at its highest point in its arc, as it does its morning ascension. And then I think like at the end of February, it starts to set back down. Yeah, I think that’s right. And then this week as well, we have the moon come in. So I think tonight or tomorrow morning, I should say, the moon is going to be up by Jupiter. Yeah. And then I think tomorrow, the next day kind of drops back down toward Mars, and then into Saturn, and then kind of past Mercury and Venus after that, too. So I think like over the next three to four days, we’re gonna see the moon in the in the next every morning to Yeah, it’d be cool to watch it move past. Yeah, it will be really cool. I’m excited to try and observe it a little bit. I think it’ll be it’ll be a good thing to check out.
Yeah, I want to take a telescope out some time while the planets are all up. One of the cool things that’s happening right now are with the planets being visible right now is Saturday, Saturn is a, like a 26 degree tilt. Edge wise. Oh, cool. Which means its springs are really visible. Yeah, if you have a telescope. Yeah, I think it’d be really cool to check that out. I think it’s like its brightest moons are pretty easy to see right now, too.
Oh, that’s great. Yeah, I’d love to try and try and do some stuff with with Saturn. And Saturn is going to get a lot easier to do as the year gets a little bit further on, and then moves into the part of the evening where we were able to observe it a little better, or where it’s kind of twisted away from the morning horizon line and all the light that kind of comes with that. As soon as we’re kind of shifted away from it so that it rises when it comes up in opposition, we should probably be like, I guess like, she what would that be like? Probably end of May, I think is when that part of the sky is gonna start rising up around sunset. And I think it will. Yeah, so this is the trick that I remember learning before is that Scorpio rises as Orion sets that are like kind of opposite each other in the horizon. And they’re sort of part of the mythology is that Orion’s chasing? Or I think I think Orion is fading Taurus the bowl, but Scorpio is chasing Orion. Yeah, but Scorpio. Orion’s out of the way when Scorpio rises, that sort of thing. And right now Saturn is in Scorpio, that’s what’s going to be staying there for the rest of the year. And so when Orion starts to set is when Scorpio starts to rise in the evening sky. So that’ll be when Saturn will be in opposition to us. And that’s when if we went out at like midnight, and did telescopes or observations a Saturday, they would come out the clearest or the best for us because it’d be the darkest part of the sky. And it’ll be highest up in the sky too. So we’ll have the the least of a long angle to try and look through. It’ll be less atmosphere for us to try and observe Saturn through. But it’s really cool that you found out that they’re out there till right now, because it’s like a cycle, right? Yeah. I think it’s like, what is it like? It’s part of the Saturn’s 27 year orbit, since it’s had a tilt to us. There’s some times where the plane of the tilt is tilted toward us and other times where we’d kind of be add on to it, and we really be able to see it as well.
Yeah, there are definitely there are times that you can barely be seen.
Yeah, it’s really strange how it’s variable like that, and how you kind of have to, or just thinking about it. It’s kind of strange, but it’s had its access. And it’s cool that we’re going to be able to see it now. I think it’s like, I don’t know, I think it’s maybe seven years or so. She actually looked that up again. Oh, yeah, sure our relationship goes with it. But it’s cool that we will be able to see it now. And yeah, we should definitely make make as many attempts as we can get some observations of it.
I think it’d be pretty cool.
Yeah, me too. I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s really any easier or more special right now, this moment. But another cool observation that you can make with binoculars right now is the four largest moons of Jupiter is supposed to be good for looking at right now. Yeah, that’d be cool. Do you know do you know their names?
Yeah, I think. Okay, so the four that you can see, these are the four that Galileo found with his time. Yeah, and this is kind of approved the, or just kind of what well followed to prove, you know, that he was kind of on the right track of understanding how solar systems record sort of how the bodies and solar systems were working against each other. But for Jupiter, the moons are, I think it’s Ganymede, Callisto, io, and Europa. For that we before that we can see and then there’s tons more that are out there that are smaller sizes. I think they’re like, I think for the longest or think was through like the 70s. I haven’t sold textbook from the 60s or 70s. And it said that there were 16 moons and then I had another textbook from the 1980s. That said there were 72 moons and then like another textbook from the 2000s. That said there were more than 100 moons, you know so they kind of I think it’s just however far the threshold goes down that they’re going to accept like how big of an object it is that they exist. A named moon, probably other astronomers trying to say that they have a name of a thing that’s out there that they found and tracked. But, but yeah, there’s a bunch of moons that are in the orbit of Jupiter there. I think Jupiter actually even has rings. They’re really faint and they’re not as visible a lot of the planets do, it’s actually unusual for a planet to not have some type of ring. Much of the time, it’s not as visible as what we see with Saturn, because that’s such a big rocky ring like Uranus and Neptune. I think. Which one is it? I think they both have subtle rings, but I think they’re, like, difficult to see. The Jupiter I think does have rings around it. I think that’s kind of where a lot of these larger bodies that are now being catalogued as moons are coming from. Yeah, but the big ones that we see, when you look in any telescope, really, it’s really cool. In fact, there’s actually reports of I don’t know if it’s true or not, but there’s reports of before Galileo seeing the moons in the telescope of natives seeing a moon around Jupiter with the naked eye. Oh, really? Yeah, there’s old reports. Well, before Galileo saying that there were four bodies that circle Jupiter. interest. Yeah, really strange. So I don’t know. There’s it’s like thought that they saw it with the naked eye. Or it’s thought that they found some other way to see it. Wow. What do you know what region the those Indians man? I’m not sure. I’m not sure am I that might just be a lie to
be really interesting, though, I wonder? Because they’re, like we see now. I mean, it’s really different now with, yeah, with all the buildings and cities that we have built up. But there are still areas now where you can go and it’s a lot darker, and there’s a lot more that you can see. So I wonder if, if maybe they were just in the right place.
I’ve heard that if you have if you have impeccable vision, really, really, really good vision. And good night vision. On top of that, you can see that there are movies that are observable dots around Jupiter, I don’t know how you do it there. I
don’t have that good. Pretty incredible. Look at this guy by yourself. See that?
There’s other reports to have like, like I think like serious having being a double star. There was some tribes in South America, this series was a double star. And we didn’t prove that until like the 1950s. Like we didn’t find out that is starting to tell them really well. Yeah, they’re wrong, because it’s not a double star. And then we find out later Oh, but it is a double star. So I think it’s kind of in the same vein as that. But yeah, those moons are really cool. Because you can see them really, and they’re observable to anybody, we should, we should kind of follow up throughout the year. But anybody that’s, that’s an imposition on the earth where they can see Jupiter at night, can see those four moons up. And it’s cool. And it’s a fun experiment that we should try and do is you can kind of track the motion, you can track their orbits as they circle around Jupiter. And that’s where they sort of figured out the model that of the solar system, I think of what is it like a heliocentric solar system, where like the sun is at the center, and then there are Earth, earthly bodies outside of that, that orbit the sun, and then bodies that are moons that orbit those planets. That sort of model I think was proven when Galileo was able to observe these four planets are assuming I said this on the last podcast you I think I called the moons planets. But Galileo was able to observe and track scientifically is the moon’s would orbit around the planet over a course of four or five days. And so this was kind of his proof to sort of demonstrate that the bodies were orbiting another planet, and that’s sort of what we were observing with our moon. And that we were like Jupiter, another planet that had a moon Jupiter was a moon, and that we orbited both the sun how cool Yeah, it was cool. Yeah, that would be fun to do a little observation of Yeah, I want to do some stuff like that. Do I’ve done it for a couple days in a row like where we’d go ahead and and look at like Jupiter over a couple of nights and you can see the moons kind of moving around we should learn the order again. I know I think yeah. So I think the order the moons out, so you can kind of like look at Jupiter at the center. And then remember sort of the sequence of the four orbits out so between like Gainey, me Callisto, io and Europa. I think it might be that order, but I’m not sure. And I think the other interesting thing What is it like? I think it’s Gainey Mead. I should look this up before I say it. But I think Ganymede is the moon. That’s the largest moon in the solar system. But it might be Callisto and I have mixed up. They’re both really big. They’re both, I think just barely bigger than our moon in the sky. And so the Earth’s moon is I want to almost the largest moon in the solar system. I think Titan is another really large moon. I think that’s the largest moon around Saturn.
I’m sorry, I was just gonna ask whose moon that was?
Yeah, times around Saturn. And that’s a really Large one that’s a lot of gas though. But I think it’s either Gani meter calisto, their largest moons in the solar system and they’re around Jupiter. And then like IO is that really volcanic lava covered moon. And then Europa is a really icy moon, that’s the one that they say is covered in water in water ice. And that’s the one where they postulate that, like tidal friction from Jupiter, being that it’s so massive right next to the planet, or exceeding the moon of Europa. The inside core of Europa is keeping water melted or water liquid, and that they think that there’s like, a place for like life to be on Europa. Oh, interesting. Yeah, where they say it’s like, one of the one of the only other places that has sort of a sustained amount of things would be an ecosystem for life. It’s cool. Yeah, that’s really cool. Yeah, that’s what I don’t know. I don’t think they have done too many. really in depth scientific explorations of of Europa so far. I think they’ve maybe got a probe out there when they had Oh, shoot, what was it was a Viking. They had one of them go out by by Jupiter on a pass and get like a bunch of high res photos and get imagery, like the moons and stuff while they’re out there. But it wasn’t really as advanced as with the stuff that we have now like the the was just had that one like this last summer that cruised by Pluto. We just got our first Yeah, high resolution photographs of Pluto. I remember in high school and astronomy class, we had like a little white sphere to represent what Pluto look like, because we didn’t have any maps of it. Little White sphere. Yeah. So I thought that was really strange. I was like, Man, it’s 2006. And we still have never even seen what Pluto looks like. There’s still like a lot to discover out there. Yeah, strange. But, but yeah, it’s really cool. Yeah, we should definitely try and look up and do some observations of those moons around Jupiter. Yeah, I’d like to. Yeah, that’s when it would be a good time for it to. I think Jupiter is now rising. I think even if we went out like right now we’d be able to see it. I think it’s just a little bit after nine o’clock 10 o’clock on like the West Coast or during the evening sky right now at the end of January. So we should be able to see Jupiter, that’s probably what they were talking about is that Jupiter is not coming up kind of near opposition or, or sort of mid, or you know, into the night alone. Be really dark and clear. And so we’ll be able to look up and make some some better, sharper observations of it. I think it’d be really fun. Yeah, me too. This is a good time to be looking at things. Yeah. I was looking at. Because we talked about on the last episode, we talked about that occultation of all Tiburon. Like when when the moon covered up on Iran in the constellation of Taurus last week. And so I think it happened the day after that. We talked about it on the podcast. And so I was out looking at it like when I was, I think it was like, I was getting done with work. And I was looking at, I was making some observations of it. It’s really difficult, though, because it’s like, almost a full moon. And it’s sort of just blacking out that whole section of the sky. So bright out. So it’s really not a spectacular thing to see. It’s not like an eclipse or something like that. But it really seems like it has a big effect on what you’re able to observe. You know, while you’re out there. But But yeah, it was really it was cool to see or it’s it’s just interesting when you’re able to observe like, wow, that whole star that I do know is there’s just completely Aussies guide right now. Yeah, it’s just totally covered up. Yeah, that’s cool. It’s, it’s interesting. That’s like, yeah, it’s cool. I think there’s gonna be another two or three occultations of Alderaan. Throughout the year, it seems like all the brands, the one that gets that gets occulted the most, I think it’s just right. And I think a couple of the other times it can happen during the daytime. So it’s gonna be after Taurus kind of passes out as a night sky. And so it really won’t be something that would be a spectacular observation. But it was cool to see just a couple days ago, I think if I was remembering back to the time that I think I watched the moon as a crescent, are like really early on in the stage of the moon. Like at the beginning of the month, Passover Mars, I think was back in like 2007 2008, maybe April or so 2008. I remember going out in Corvallis and trying to watch it back window the place I love that. As fun. As you can see the little red dot Mrs. B just passed over in just a Hey. Well, it goes that’s cool. Because like the black part of the disc, the dark side of the moon is the first part to pass over it. So you just see. You see the star in the sky? This guy clips over occulted that would be cool to see. That seems like it’d be a little more of a Yeah, spectacle. Yeah, probably is. As a Christian. Yeah, it does look a little bit more interesting. And it’s just better. It’s easier to observe the sky while you know all the pieces that are rounded out there. Yeah, and it’s not a full moon. It’s just too bright. Yeah.
But, but yeah, it was cool. It was cool to see. So I think that wraps up just about everything for this episode. The night sky podcast. Hopefully everybody gets to go out and make a good observation of the five planets and the moon up in the sky during this next week, the night sky The morning sky should say and I guess for myself and on behalf of Marina Hanson, my name is Billy Newman and thank you for listening to this episode of the night sky podcast.