Caoimhín's Content

Today, we are going to take a look at some upcoming events based on the suggestions of various commenters on my YouTube videos. In celebration of hitting 500 subscribers on YouTube, I am planning on making a Q&A video. As such, I am looking for any questions that anybody might have that I may be able to answer. If you have any questions, please do post them in the comments below, or on YouTube or my Instagram, wherever is easiest for you.

The first event that we’re going to take a look at is one that is coming up this month. We’re looking ahead to the morning of the 16th of July. Given the positions, you may also see this late on the 15th of July, but things will look better if you push through to the 16th. We will start as normal in Ireland, but we may have to travel to another location on the world to get the best view. Looking south as we pass into the 16th, Saturn and the Moon are visible close together in the sky. Even with the naked eye, they are clearly close. They get closer together as we push towards sunrise, but they stay apart as Saturn vanishes. We’re not just looking at the Moon and Saturn. By taking a closer look, especially while the sky is very dark, you may notice Neptune. Neptune is only a faint distant dot, but it is right above Saturn at the moment in the Northern Hemisphere. Unfortunately the Moon is so bright that it is able to block out Neptune if both are in the same field of view.

We can certainly see Saturn and the Moon pretty close together from here in Ireland, but it looks like the Sun is coming up before they get to their closest together. Of course the Moon is following a different line to the curve of the ecliptic, so there is never a guarantee that they will get particularly close. Either way, the light of the Sun scattering in the atmosphere will block out Saturn. We don’t have to worry about the Earth getting in the way or the atmosphere getting in the way if we’re using Stellarium, we can move through time with the clouds and the ground taken away. It looks like the closest that Saturn and the Moon are going to get happens just after the sky gets too bright, from here in Ireland that is definitely during the day, but it’s not too bad. We still get to see Saturn and the Moon reasonably close together while the Sun is still under the horizon, the Moon is just a little bit further from Saturn while they are up before the Sun. As I mentioned, the light of the Moon will make Neptune very hard to see, but once the light of the Moon is out of the way, we can see Neptune with a telescope at least, most binoculars maybe too small. Moving through time, it doesn’t look like Saturn and Neptune will get much closer, or much further, from each other in the near future. I had thought that if we got rid of the atmosphere, we would be able to see Neptune even if the Moon was nearby, but apparently not, at least not in Stellarium’s simulation. It looks like the Moon is bright enough and close enough to the planets here that its light is able to interfere even if we have the atmosphere turned off.

Neptune and Saturn, Neptune in particular, move pretty slowly across the sky, so it’s going to take a while for their relative positions to change. They do look pretty close at the moment, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s about as close as they are going to get. It looks like they’re both pretty close to the ecliptic, with Neptune being a little bit higher closer to the ecliptic from below. With Stellarium we can double check by bringing up the ecliptic line. They are both under the line of the ecliptic at the moment, and we would have to travel through a fair bit of time for their positions to noticeably change, due to their long orbits. By moving through a little time, we can see that Neptune and Saturn don’t get much closer together, they’re almost as close as they’re going to get at the moment. There’s still a good distance there between them, even if we travel pretty significantly through time. Saturn’s also doing a little bit of a retrograde motion over around the current time period. Saturn appears to drop back towards Neptune over the course of June, reach their closest in mid-July, and then Saturn races ahead of Neptune again. It appears to change its direction as it moves past the stars. This apparent retrograde motion is something that the more distant planets will do for quite a while each around their opposition as we orbit the Sun.

Coming back to the date where the Moon is at its closest to the planets, on the 16th, and we’ll bring them back up above the horizon for us here in Ireland. We are going to see the Moon and Saturn at pretty much their closest from here in Ireland, just before the sunrise. That is a nice soon event, you can catch this as the Sun is rising this very month. Later, as the Sun rises, we will also have Venus for a lot of the morning, and you may catch Jupiter, just about popping up as well. Jupiter is going to be hard to see early in the month, it gets easier as we get later in the month. However, we’re not worried too much about what the sky is going to look like for this coming July. You can take a look at a couple of my recent posts to see such an overview. Instead, we’re going to look a little further into the future to check out our next event.

We are still looking at July, we’ll be looking forward a little later in the month to the 24th of July, and then we will be looking much further into the future all the way up to the year 2037. Once we’re up to 2037, we want to take a look in the constellation of Leo. Given the month, we’re going to be seeing this at sunset. We have looked at something happening in Leo, in the slightly further future recently, but we’ll zoom in here and take a look. Very quickly, we have Venus, and then Saturn. From here in Ireland it looks like they are difficult to see due to stuff in the way. If we have trees and buildings in the way, we won’t be able to see things as they come close to the horizon. With our perfect zero horizon, suddenly we can see Mercury as well. We will have Venus, Saturn and Mercury, as well as the bright star Regulus. A few days later, we can see Venus and Saturn getting even closer together. They are all in the glow of sunset, but even the star Regulus is bright enough to shine through. That’s another nice collection of objects, all right next to each other, right next to the Sun as it is setting.

The close conjunction of Venus and Saturn is something that I want to take a closer look at, to see if I could get them to line up perfectly. As they get closer together, Venus remains very much above Saturn. They get closer together a bit after they set in Ireland. Really, this is before the Sun sets again, after we follow them under the horizon, they come back around on the opposite side. To get the best view, we want to find a place where the Sun is already set for this moment in time, but Venus and Saturn are still up. We’ll start just by changing our longitude. Hopefully, with a little bit of jumping around, we’ll get everything into the right position. Hopping a few hundred kilometers east improves the positions, but not enough. The Sun is still above the horizon, so we’ll go a little bit further. By looking at the south as we hop eastward, we can see now that the Sun gets further west. With the atmosphere off, we can see that Venus and Saturn are no longer over the east, they’re starting come over to the west as well. We’ll keep moving even further east. Once we are at a place where the Sun is under the horizon, we can turn the atmosphere back on. Unfortunately, I was trying to stay at roughly the same latitude, and with that steep of an angle of the ecliptic at sunset, I don’t think it’s going to work. We will have to go closer to the equator as well.

We might as well hop down significantly while we’re moving, from 50-odd degrees north to just 20. In the end, just around, 22 degrees north and 153 degrees east seems just right. There, we can see Mercury, Regulus and Venus, with Venus and Saturn particularly close together. Venus isn’t occulting Saturn as it did in a previously described event, one which is till in the far future. We’ve already taken a look at Venus occulting Saturn, but it seems like that is even further in the future, this one, a little bit closer to the modern day, is not an occultation. I was told to take a look at the 24th, when Saturn and Venus aren’t as close, possibly because they make a nice little shape in the sky on that date, and we can see a little bit of Leo behind them as well. Each of them is visible separately, but it does look like there are a bunch of close conjunctions in the surrounding dates as the planets move past each other. Saturn and Mercury get very close, then Saturn and Venus, Venus and Regulus and then Saturn and Regulus, all getting very close together. This is really the whole month of July, or most of it at least. We’ve got some really nice conjunctions going on there, in a few decades time. This looks like they’re best visible from the Pacific Ocean, just around Micronesia, Guam and the Philippine Sea. If you live on one of the islands around there then you should have a fantastic view, from back here in Ireland things won’t be quite as good.

That’s one event that’s coming up this year so we won’t have to wait too long for that to happen and then another event coming up decades into the future. We’ll pop back to the modern day and take one last look at that close conjunction of the Moon, Saturn and Neptune. It’s definitely a pretty close conjunction between Saturn and Neptune, they’re right next to each other in the the sky, but the light of the Moon will obscure Neptune. It will be very hard to see Neptune with the fuller-than-a-half Moon in the way. As soon as that Moon is out of the way, such as a few days late, then Neptune will be easier to spot. Neptune is out there, quite close in the sky to Saturn, but not visible to the naked eye, it certainly requires knowing where to look. That’s something we’ve got to look forward to really in just a couple of weeks, that’s coming up this month. However, the even better, I have to admit, the even better group of conjunctions coming up in 2037, we do have to wait a little bit longer for those,

I hope that you enjoyed this piece, in the next piece we will be looking at a few more future events so that I have time to build up some questions for a question and answer video. Again, if you have any questions, do let me know. If you enjoyed this piece, please do like it and do also subscribe to this website and my YouTube channel. Thank you very much for reading and hopefully I’ll see you back here next time.