Our night sky appears to us like an overarching dome sprinkled with bright points of light. Some of those points of light appear to be very close to each other, and indeed the ancients envisioned the stars as all being…
Tag: Jupiter
Jupiter and the Fourth of July
There are currently 24 active spacecraft exploring the solar system beyond low Earth orbit, ranging from the relatively nearby–Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is mapping our moon–to the far-flung. Voyager 1 has actually left the solar system and is currently 135 astronomical…
Venus, Jupiter…and Earth
Those of us of a certain age will remember these song lyrics: When the moon is in the seventh house And Jupiter aligns with Mars… Jupiter is about to align not with Mars, but with Venus, the ancient goddess of…
A Cosmic Dance
The two brightest planets in the sky right now—and the two brightest planets, period—are Venus and Jupiter. Shortly after sunset at the end of April, Venus is the very bright object in the west, and Jupiter is only a little…
Bright Objects
In case you were wondering, the two very bright objects visible in the sky shortly after sunset are Venus (in the west) and Jupiter (in the southeast). After the sun and the moon, these are the two brightest natural celestial…
Weekend Sky Show
The two brightest planets in the sky, Venus and Jupiter, have been drawing closer and closer to each other as seen from Earth for the past several days. This weekend they will be joined by the hard-to-see innermost planet Mercury…
Conjunctions and Oppositions
One of the great lessons of astronomy is that appearances can be deceiving—things are not always what they seem to be. What appear to be pin pricks of light too dim to see in the daytime are in fact enormous…
Planets In The Morning
One of the more pleasing aspects of astronomy is the extent to which it is utterly predictable. The North Star will never appear in the southern sky, the Southern Cross will never be visible from Virginia, and if Orion is…
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