Great Planetary Alignment - how to see ALL the planets!

Salutations celestial sight seers! I am David Fuller with Eyes on the Sky. What's up this week? There's an awesome planetary alignment happening over in the morning sky and I will share with you not only how to see all the bright easy planets but the dim difficult ones and that's the important part. We want to be able to see all the planets right? So let's start with We will be looking in the southeastern part of the sky in general even though we're going to look all the way from east northeast through south but generally facing towards the southeast. You should be able to see everything in your visual field of view. Jupiter is going to be very obvious nice and high towards the southeast. If you look down in the left towards the eastern part of the sky Venus will be nice and brilliant. Between them will be the moon and the moon will be over there depending on what morning you are looking. As well it's going to slide this direction. I'll do more on that a little bit later. And then all the way towards the south if you follow the line of Venus, Mars, Jupiter all the way out towards the south you can also spot where Saturn is at. Those are the easy ones. Those are fairly bright. The dimmest one is Saturn at magnitude one or zero. It's pretty bright. It shouldn't be difficult to find at all. The difficult one to see as far as the naked eye planets is going to be Mercury and that is because it's perpetually stuck in twilight. As I like to say it's kind of at its best it's caught between darkness and twilight and there's a golden 15 minutes that you can really see it at its best whether it's in the evening sky or the morning sky and that happens to be that 30 to 45 minutes either before sunrise or after sunset that Mercury is really high enough up to be able to see it and also bright enough and the sky is dark enough that you have enough contrast to be able to spot that little quick moving innermost planet that is really kind of the challenging one. Unfortunately we have Jupiter, Mars, the Moon and Venus to point right the way towards where it's at but the timing is very important so for me I'm going to be out at about 4 35 in the morning on Friday morning because that's 45 minutes before my local sunrise and as you watch what happens over the next 15 minutes it rises up it actually goes for me from about four degrees up which is really difficult to see because there's a lot of atmosphere it's going through all the way up to seven degrees which actually kind of gets it up and above a little bit more of that atmosphere making it simpler to see however you can see how the sky starts to get brighter so you start to lose it there's really kind of a maybe you know you want to be looking kind of that whole time not directly at it necessarily every single minute of that but definitely keep looking back every minute or two to see if you can spot where that innermost planet is if you are having trouble and don't don't see it naked eye and you're getting towards that you know half hour before sunrise time not to worry again follow your line start at Venus and bring out some binoculars and that will help you spot it the planet is a little more than a field of view and a half from Venus so if you start at Venus and head towards where the sun will rise obviously don't use the binoculars after the sun has risen but if you head towards that direction you should be able to spot Mercury however one thing I do want to point out is if we look right here and zoom in there is a star there too that's around the same magnitude so Mercury is going to be the higher one it should be a little brighter but Mercury is definitely the one that's going to be up and to the left so just don't confuse the star that happens to be lower it's also going to be that star is going to be through more atmosphere so it should be more difficult to see and Mercury should be the one that you spot first anyway that's how you find where Mercury is now if we want to find where Uranus is at we have to kind of get rid of where the moon is going to be for us so that we can there we go there's Uranus hiding over here like that it is part way between Venus and Mars the moon will be kind of past it on either side on the 24th and 25th so that actually could cause a problem if there's a little bit of additional light over there that way but if you want to try to find it I'm going to back up to that 45 minutes before because that gives us a little bit more darkness that's actually a better time to try to be looking for it so if you spot Mercury early or if you can't see Mercury right away you can start looking for this instead notice this star over here that is a 2.5 magnitude star known as Menkar in the constellation of Cetus it forms a pretty good triangle here with Venus and the moon or excuse me Venus and Uranus and we are then able to hopefully find where that planet is by getting some of this other stuff out of the way because it kind of blocks it so we can use this star right here which will be in the same field of view as this 2.5 magnitude star so you can literally just kind of like look from Venus across the horizon like that and then if we use our binoculars and we head up there's that other star both in the same field of view even if you've got a 5 degree field of view with some 10 by 50 binoculars you should be able to get both in there follow that same line upward in this direction like this and what you're going to not see first is necessarily where Uranus is but you might see these two stars which point right at the planet so if you go past Uranus that's fine see those two stars right next to each other go aha I found them they should be almost the same magnitude as Uranus boom head right back to it just don't confuse it with these two stars which are further apart but if you follow that line again it's about a field of view and a half to two fields of view as you head over that way you should be able to find where the seventh planet in the solar system is now to find where Neptune is that that's the tricky one because the sun is rising it is not as bright as Uranus is it is an eighth magnitude object so as we zoom in over here there's Neptune if you look for the line that Jupiter and Saturn form here like that Neptune is on that line so you're not actually going to go all the way across that way but what we are going to do is imagine that line by starting at Jupiter with our binoculars or if binoculars are not enough oomph then you may want to use your finder scope on a telescope because that should have the same field of view as binoculars and then head over in that direction towards where Saturn is and we're going to notice that there's a pattern in the sky that is kind of like a hockey stick like this so there's four stars they're all kind of equal brightness you'll also notice that there's these two stars down here that form this little quadrilateral thing so this is not difficult to identify once you've found that you're going to go ah I found the hockey stick oh yes so remember this line because we're going to follow that line we go up the hockey stick like this we're going to follow that now we're going to go that bottom of the hockey stick line like this over here there's a star right there that is almost exactly the same magnitude as Neptune and Neptune is right above it right there it is not bright it is an object that is 7.8 magnitude this star right here is just a hair brighter at 7.3 magnitude about a half magnitude brighter but if you can see the star you might be able to pick out Neptune what's interesting about Neptune is that it really does look blue it's not like a blue white star I mean it really does look blue it also looks very small in binoculars so you may not pick up that color and that's okay but if you're using a large enough telescope you should be able to see that blue color especially if this telescope is larger because it's really kind of obvious the one thing again you're going to be fighting is that you know brightening of the twilight morning so you might need to do this over a morning or two to be able to see both the outer planets and Mercury especially if you're trying to use a telescope to be able to see where Neptune is but the great thing about Neptune is you can get up earlier and look for that first and then kind of work your way down and then look for Mercury last you don't necessarily have to go in the order that I did however there's a bonus and the bonus is that I talked about earlier the moon so if we bring up our date here again we can see on the 23rd the moon is close to Mars kind of splits that difference on the 24th that's what I'm going to be looking on Friday morning it gets close to Venus on the 25th and it's really close on the 26th now what happens on the 27th is it's near Mercury but it's also really really really small if we zoom in look how thin that crescent is that's an old moon right there even if we go back to the 26th that's a pretty old moon and not much of a crescent either but on the 27th that's not a lot you might actually use Mercury to find the moon on that day so anyway that is your guide on how to find all eight planets and I know you're thinking wait Dave you only talked about seven you because you did Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune but all you got to do is look down at your feet and you can see the eighth planet which is the planet Earth and I would be remiss if I did not say that I still think Pluto is a planet so there should be nine but the International Astronomical Union decided otherwise despite the fact that I think their criteria doesn't make any sense and so Pluto should be a planet but in any case of the eight major planets that are still technically in existence you can see all of them this week and weekend if you have some clear skies and a really low horizon to catch Mercury I encourage you to do it it's fun and even if you're tired it's totally worth it get out there and do it. I'm David Fuller with Eyes on the Sky wishing you clear and dark skies.