Caoimhín's Content

For today, we will be looking at the planets, and especially we will be looking at the Parade of the Planets or the March of the Planets. The attached video is in Irish, with English subtitles of course, and both parade and march seem to be words borrowed from English. Parade seems to b associated with a military parade, whereas a march is used for various processions as well, such as a bridal procession. You can use whichever version you prefer. We will be looking at the planets because all of them are in the sky at the same time. Every one of the planets, the ones that we can see with the naked eye and the two that we aren’t able to see, all of them are in the sky at this year at this time of the month of February. We will mostly be looking at the sky for tomorrow night at sunset, and even tonight at sunset, the 25th and 26th of February. It will be visible if you are out at the right time, and this parade or march should continue on for a few days yet.

Just a few of minutes past 6, maybe 6:30 from the city, and we are able to see Mars, Jupiter, Venus and Mercury all together reasonably easily. The planet Saturn usually isn’t too hard to see, it’s usually Mercury that is hard to see. However the planet Saturn is quite low for these dates, very close to the Sun. The planet Saturn isn’t particularly bright and Saturn is also lower in the sky. With Saturn being closer to the Sun, this part of the sky next to Saturn is a little brighter than the part of the sky up here with Mercury. The difference isn’t a lot as there isn’t much difference in the locations, Saturn is just a little lower than Mercury, but with the light of the Sun and the atmosphere interfering with Saturn, it will be a lot harder to see Saturn. There isn’t much difference in how bright these two planets are, though I think that Mercury is a little bit brighter at this time at least.

Without any atmosphere we can see that they are represented by circles that are pretty close in size. In this Stellarium software, with the planets or any circle, if the circles are similar in size, the objects then are similar in terms of how bright they are. This shows Mercury to be a little brighter than Saturn, but with the atmosphere restored and the light of the Sun moving through that atmosphere, Saturn appears much fainter. If we push ahead later in the evening, then the planets will get lower, and the trees and everything else will be in the way. However, the sky is also getting a little darker, and with that darkness Saturn will be a little bit easier to see. You do have to be in a place with a very clear horizon, with nothing standing in your way when you are looking for things that are low in the sky. If you are able to see Mercury, Saturn will be near it for tonight, as it was last night, but while we push ahead they will be spreading out away form each other.

This is sort of one of the problems with the parade of planets. I have a couple of problems with the parade the planets, but one is that the planets aren’t going in the same direction. Most of the planets are travelling across the sky from east to west, falling down further night by night as we move forward. Even Venus at this time of the year, Venus is moving in the right way, getting further west each night. This is rather than Venus moving the wrong way or further east each night. Venus could move the wrong way, known as apparent retrograde motion, but that isn’t the case for Venus right now. It is however the case for Mercury, Mercury is still pushing ahead, getting higher and higher in the sky further from the sunset. It won’t be until the 8th of March that Mercury will reach its greatest elongation from the Sun. Quickly looking ahead to sunset on the 8th of March, Mercury will be a lot easier to spot and very close to Venus in the sky. Mercury will be at it’s highest in the west, at its greatest elongation from the Sun. Then both Venus and Mercury will fall closer to the Sun, continuing to move in the expected direction for all the planets. Saturn will be gone by this point in early March. From the 8th to maybe the 11th, Mercury and Venus will be very close together above the sunset, but they will disappear form view soon after the 11th. We are also moving ahead to the night of the equinox, and so the Sun is going to go down later and later, the days are going to be getting longer and longer.

We are going to come back to tonight and continue to look for the planet Saturn. I am going to remove the trees, along with any hills or other details, replacing the landscape with the perfectly flat zero horizon. Using this strange view with nothing in our way, with nothing standing in that direction obscuring the bottom of the sky. From a reasonable field of view, sort of standing back with a lot of the sky visible, Saturn is there coming out, but very difficult to see, even as late as about 7 o’clock. The Sun should be low enough that you are able to use a binoculars or even a telescope, to look closer at these planets, but there will still be a lot of atmosphere in the way. If we zoom in on the planet Saturn here, we can see a couple of the moons here, which is always nice. The rings of Saturn are very hard to see at the moment, as they are almost on their side form our perspective. We are looking at them edge on so they will be very thin and therefore a bit harder to see than usual. Still, we can see a couple of the moons here if your telescope is big enough, Titan in particular isn’t too hard to see. However, Titan will orange, and Saturn is sort orange as well, so with that orange light from the Sun coming up behind them, they will be even more obscured. Saturn will be going behind the Sun over the next few days, as it must be behind the Sun from this point from our perspective.

Mercury is coming out to its greatest elongation, coming out from behind the Sun. Taking a closer look at Mercury and more than half of Mercury is visible. really, it is just more than half of the half facing the Earth which is illuminated, but we can call Mercury a Half Mercury the same way we do for a Half Moon, even if it isn’t strictly accurate. Still, Mercury is going away from the Sun from our perspective, for that reason, Mercury is not gong behind the Sun, it is coming out from behind the Sun, Mercury will be going back over in front of the Sun once we are later into the month of March. They are the two hardest planets to spot at the moment. Saturn and Mercury are hard to spot, but Venus is easy enough. Venus will be high enough in the sky and out early enough in the evening that we are able to see Venus with ease. taking a closer look we see a narrow crescent Venus, meaning it is closer to us here, almost on our side of the Sun. Venus is going in front of the Sun at this point of its orbit as well, very similar to the way in which Mercury will be when the two of them are going in front of the Sun, again when we are into the month of March.

There is another planet in low in the west, and I almost forgot about, Neptune. Neptune is always hard to see and when Neptune is so low in the sky like this, Neptune will be very very hard to see. Neptune is always very hard to see but it is a little harder to see when the light of the Sun is there and Neptune is setting in the direction of the horizon, down to the place where the atmosphere is very thick. However, we can still zoom in for a closer look. As the planet comes into view so do a couple of the moons and you might see its ring. The ring of Neptune is very thin, the same as the ring around Uranus or Jupiter, very thin and therefore very hard to see. Neptune’s largest moon Triton is big enough. Triton is a big moon, but it is so far from us, that it still requires a massive telescope to see, it is a lot harder to spot than Titan or the moons that around Jupiter.

Before we go take a look at Jupiter we are going to zoom in for Uranus. Jupiter and Uranus, both of them are up in roughly the same place. Uranus is sort of after the Pleiades in the direction of Venus from Jupiter, but close enough to the Pleiades and close enough to Jupiter in this part of the sky. Jupiter is on the opposite side of the Pleiades, just above Aldebaran. If we zoom in on Uranus, a couple of the moons around Uranus become visible, and they are closer to equal sized compared to some of the other systems of moons. Titan is much bigger than the other moons around Saturn, and Triton much bigger than the other moons around Neptune. Around Uranus here, there are a couple of moons that are very big, like Titania, Oberon, Ariel, Umbriel, but there isn’t one of them which is way bigger than the others. This is similar to the four very large Galilean moons around Jupiter, along with many smaller moons orbiting each of these massive planets. The rings of Uranus are there as well and we are looking down on these rings sort of from above. From a top down point of view like this, the rings are a lot easier to see, but still the rings around Uranus are a lot thinner than the rings around Saturn. If we were looking down on the rings around Saturn from above like this the view would be beautiful, as the rings around Saturn are wide in their own right as well.

Zooming in on Jupiter now, the penultimate planet in the parade, the moons are coming out almost immediately. The four biggest moons are almost up on top of each other for tonight, with Calisto, Ganymede, Io at least visible, but no sign of Europa at sunset. Thankfully, with Jupiter you can look at it a few days in a row to bring the other moon into view. A few days in the future and we have Europa, Ganymede, Calisto and Io, all four are visible at the end of the month. However for a couple of nights around now now, tonight, tomorrow, the night after that, it will be hard to see the four Galilean moons all together early in the evening. There will be three visible but there may not be four. If we zoom in on Jupiter even more for tonight, we can see the shadow of one of the moons along with a small moon in front of Jupiter. I presume that that shadow is coming from one of the bigger moons, one of the Galilean ones out at the side. The Great Red Spot isn’t visible early in the evening tonight, but looking ahead to tomorrow and the Great Red Spot is facing the direction of the Earth. You only need to wait one night for the Great Red Spot, that huge storm, to come around.

To finish, the last planet, high in the sky and easy to see, up for the majority of the night, we have Mars the Red Planet. Zooming in, the two moons of Mars are there, but very hard to see, The two moons, Phobos and Deimos, look a lot bigger here in the Stellarium software than they look in the real sky, and they are particularly tricky to spot with an actual telescope. We are looking at an interesting part of Mars already, with both poles of Mars visible by their icecaps. One is its losing its ice, dry ice from carbon dioxide, subliming into the atmosphere from one side and sticking back down on the other icecap. If we look through a couple of nights here we’ll get to see Mars rotate, and there is a volcano to be seen tonight but it isn’t one of the very famous or very big volcanoes. Within a few days Olympus Mons comes into view, and Olympus Mons is next to the three Tharsis volcanoes. The other volcano, or the other mountain here as these are extinct volcanoes, it must be very big, as we can see it from space, or from the Earth with a telescope. However, it still isn’t the very famous one.

That is it for tonight, one of the best nights for looking at the parade of planets or the march of the planets. It is one of the best nights, especially if you are by the seaside or at the beach, with nothing in your way to see the lower planets, Saturn and Mercury. That is all the planets, all up at the same time. If you enjoyed this article then please do like it. If you have an interest in astronomy, or in Irish, make sure that you subscribe to this website and my YouTube channel as well. I’m sure I’ll see you back here again next time.