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
