The Planetary Parade
As the sun sets, look to the southwest for Venus. With a clear view of the horizon, you might spy Mercury below and to the right of Venus at week’s end, but the innermost planet’s viewing days are numbered. Roughly 15 degrees above Venus, look for the ruddy glow of Mars.
Thursday and Friday evening the thin crescent moon joins the throng, somewhat between Venus and Mars the first night and above Mars, forming a horizontal line with Venus the next. Venus sets within an hour of the sun, while Mars sets around 8pm. But night by night, Venus is gaining about a minute of visibility, closing the gap with Mars in the process and leading to a conjunction of the two later next month.
As these twilight planets set in the west, another rises in the east. Jupiter is hard to miss, as it is the brightest object in that part of the sky. By 9pm it is high in the east, at midnight is near the celestial zenith, and as dawn nears it is ablaze above the west horizon. A dozen degrees below the giant planet is fainter Regulus, which marks the dot of what looks like a backwards question mark. This asterism is called the Sickle of Leo and makes up the head of the larger constellation Leo the lion. A triangle of stars to the left of the sickle marks the lion’s haunches, the brightest being Denebola, which in Arabic means the lion’s tail.
Saturn rises in the wee hours of the morning, and by 6am it is well-placed in the southeast. Its rings are tilted our way so that they stand out against the planet’s surface when viewed with even a small telescope. Saturn sits at the head of the constellation Scorpius, with its red heart Antares 10 degrees below the planet and the creature’s body trailing away toward the horizon.
The moon waxes to first-quarter phase Monday, when it is almost directly overhead at sunset. Wednesday after sunset it is just a few degrees above and to the left of Aldebaran, the glaring eye of Taurus the bull, and the Hyades star cluster. Higher still are the stars of the Pleiades cluster, the Seven Sisters. While the moon’s light may make both clusters appear as fuzzy spots, simple binoculars will reveal many distinct stars in each.