More Space Stuff

This is a great month for seeing awesome stuff in the sky.  If you read my post back on March 27th, you would have read that you can now see Venus, Jupiter and Mars after night falls.  Hopefully some of you looked for these awesome visuals and found what you were looking for.  The best part is there is more.  Although you can still see Venus, Jupiter and Mars every evening after the sun goes down, there are a couple more planets to look for.  If you look on Sunday evening you will see an awesome visual of Saturn in the Eastern Sky.  Mars will still be out and Jupiter and Venus will still be shining in the West.
                                                  

That's not it.  On April 18th you will be able to see even more.  For you early birds that leave the house right before the sun rises look to the East again and you will see a tiny bit of a crescent moon with 2 stars just to the right of it.  Those my friends aren't stars, they would be Mercury and Uranus.  Uranus will over 1.5 billion miles from us.  Mercury is really hard to see, you have to look closely.  Mercury is mostly always the hardest to see because of how close it is to the Sun.

You have to remember that these planets are easily able to be spotted with telescopes any time, but to have so many visible to the naked eye is a treat.  This means that Neptune will be the only planet not really visible at night.  It's definitely there but right not it's so far away, about 3 times as far as Uranus, it's very, very difficult to see with out a magnification device.  If you have high powered binoculars or a small telescope you can see it at the tail of Capricorn.  I'm not even going to bother looking for it because I think it's way cooler to see these guys with my plain old eye balls.  Happy sky gazing!


Cheers!

K.A. Ball