Young Fishmonger of the Year

Not a huge cavalcade of excitement for you this week, though you may have heard about Kepler 10b, a new planet about 4 and half times the mass of the earth about 560 light years away, so we’re not likely to see much of it. It orbits very close to its Sun, and has a surface temperature which will melt rock, but if there's one rocky planet out there there will be others. If your interested here it is, Kepler 10b.

Nearer home, Mercury is having an excellent morning apparition. Look for it low in the east-southeast, far to the lower left of bright Venus, it rises at about 7pm in the E S E, but won’t be all that bright being so close to the rising sun.

Venus considerably brighter balazes as the "Morning Star" in the south east before and during dawn. In fact Venus rises some two hours before the first glimmer of dawn  a weird UFO of a thing low in the east-southeast. Look for Saturn and Spica very far to Venus's upper right in the south, and Arcturus even higher above Venus.

Mars as usual is lost behind the glare of the Sun.

Jupiter (magnitude –2.3, at the Pisces-Aquarius border) shines high in the south as the stars come out, then lower in the southwest later in the evening. Jupiter is the brightest starlike point in the evening sky, but it sets by 10 or 11 p.m. now. In a telescope it has shrunk to only 38 arcseconds wide as Earth rounds to the far side of the Sun from it.

Saturn rises around midnight but is best seen in a telescope high in the south before dawn (far upper right of brilliant Venus). Don't confuse Saturn with Spica below or lower left of it. And Saturn has a bit of a storm that must be a good 40,000 miles long raging across its northern hemisphere, with winds over a thousand miles an hour, at about 130 degrees below. With pellets of ammonia and ice moving like bullets, true sailing is dead.

Saturn's rings, meanwhile, have widened to 10° from edge-on, the widest they've appeared since 2007.

Uranus remains less than 1½° from Jupiter this week, and should be easily spotted in binoculars.

On Saturday, the gibbous Moon shines between Aldebaran and the Pleiades, high above Orion in early evening. Look below Orion for Sirius.

And that was your night sky for the week ending on the 591^st anniversary of King Naresuan of Siam killing Crown Prince Minchit Sra of Burma in single combat, which is why this date is now observed as Royal Thai Armed Forces day. Which strangely is largely ignored in the UK.