Mercury.

Mercury

We have an unusual contender for this week’s main attraction, tiny little Mercury. Not that its overly bright, but for once its easy to, in fact this is as good an apparition as often-elusive Mercury ever puts on and with Venus lighting the way to it, you could hardly ask for Mercury to be any easier. Look to the WNW soon after sunset and you’ll very quickly be able to spot an extremely bright Venus, if you look a little to its right you be able to see Mercury.

Yesterday evening at around 8:45 I caught the pair of them at the same time in binoculars. Venus is many times brighter than Mercury but they were the only two objects visible in that part of the sky. Venus was visible from around 8 until about 10:30 when it sank over Mincarlo, looking from the garrison.

It was a bit of a red letter day for me because it was the first time I could ever say I’d definitively seen Mercury, though I must have seen it from the plane window 6 weeks ago when it was completely over shadowed by Venus. The little planet is dimming rapidly now it was magnitude -.8 on the second but by the next week it will be right down to magnitude 1.4. So the next few days will give you your best viewing window, possibly for the next 140,000 years, but I’m speculating here.

And here’s some stuff you probably have less than no interest in about Mercury, it’s a pretty miserable place that orbits as close as 30 million miles from the Sun so it gets as hot as a monkeys bum, it whacks around the sun every 88 days, and it has a 1400 hour day, one day on Mercury is 58 of ours, more or less 9 Mercurian months long. It only revolves at 6 miles an hour so if you could maintain a brisk walk at the equator, which you couldn’t then you’d never have see the sun come up, or set, depending on whether you like extreme cold -150 degrees, or heat 500 degrees, and nothing lives there. But on the plus side there are no elections

As for the other planets they’re all around at the moment. Venus will be bright after sunset in the wnw for a while yet.

Mars, dimming into the distance at magnitude +0.3, now, it shines very high in the southwest during evening. It's in Cancer, left of Pollux and Castor and above Procyon.

Jupiter (magnitude –2.1) is emerging very low in the glow of dawn. Look for it just above the eastern horizon about 40 or 30 minutes before sunrise.

Saturn (magnitude +0.6, in the head of Virgo) is two weeks past opposition. Look for it in the east-southeast at dusk, higher in the southeast by late evening, and highest in the south by 11 or midnight.

As usual have a look at the blog for guidance, which I guess you are doing.

That was your night sky for the week ending on the 40^th anniversary of an oxygen tank on Apollo 13 exploding.