Venus and Mercury are evening objects and hard to see as the month starts. Observers close to the equator and in the low southern latitudes have the best view of Mercury pulling up higher than Venus alongside the stars of Sagittarius. Mercury is close to Kaus Borealis (the northern bow star) on the evening of […]

Our November evenings start with Saturn close to the meridian and Jupiter risen already well above the horizon at sunset. Uranus is rising when darkness begins. Mars rises mid-evening. It’s a little brighter and left of Aldebaran rising at about the same time. Aldebaran leads one leg of a V-shaped asterism called the Hyades, in […]

The moon is up in the evening approaching first quarter at October’s start. Southern lunistice will be on the 2nd at 27.4° from the equator. The first quarter phase will be the next day. Then on the 4th, the moon’s at perigee 369,400 km from Earth. The thickening gibbous disk passes by Saturn on the […]

Mercury leaves the evening sky, goes through inferior conjunction, and enters the morning sky this month. It’ll be better in the morning sky for northern hemisphere sky watchers this month than it was in the evening for them last month. It’ll take until the last few days of the month to show up though. Venus […]

Moon’s movements Our August evenings start with a crescent moon setting and Mercury below it in Leo. The messenger planet is hard to see at first from the northern hemisphere. But keep looking night to night and it’ll show up. On the opposite side of the sky, Saturn’s rising in Capricornus. The waxing moon moves […]

Earth farthest from the sun, Mercury closest Earth is farthest from the sun on the 4th. It’s 152 million kilometers or 94.5 million miles away. In six months, the sun’s disk will appear 3.6% bigger. That’s not something the human eye can detect—and don’t try without eye protection! Only in photographs or with measurements taken […]

The month starts with a waning crescent moon at northern lunistice and setting in the evening along with bright stars Procyon, Pollux, Castor, and Capella. Procyon is the bright star in the little dog Canis Minor. See Gomeisa to its right. Pollux and Castor are better known, because they are the head stars in Gemini […]

The morning “parade of planets” finishes April with Jupiter and Saturn very close. They’re as close as 0.2° at about 21 hours UT on the 30th. The best views are from about 105° east longitude. Too far east of there, and the closest conjunction hasn’t happened yet before the sun rises. Too far west of […]

Venus, Saturn, and Mars are in a dawn lineup as April begins. The red and ringed planets are in the east side of Capricornus. For northern hemisphere watchers, that’s on the left. From south of the equator, it’s the bottom of the constellation. Venus is between Capricornus and Aquarius. Observers in the low northern latitudes […]

All the naked eye planet watching this month is in the morning. A waxing crescent moon rises into the evening through Pisces early in the month. It’ll be near Uranus on the 6th. See the moon passing between the Pleiades and the Hyades on the evening of the 8th. Orion is high in the sky […]