Tag archives for venus
Gaze skyward this week and watch our solar system’s two innermost planets have a strikingly close encounter, while changing seasons brings the year’s largest moon in the sky. Moon and Spica. On Tuesday, June 18, look towards the southern sky to see the gibbous waxing moon glide extremely close to the distant star Spica (263…
This week skywatchers get a chance to watch the moon strike a pose with bright stars while the most elusive of naked-eye planets puts on its best sky show of the year. Moon poses with Venus. About 30 minutes after sunset on Monday, June 10, skywatchers around the world can look towards the very low…
Here’s what’s on tap this week for you skywatchers: Uranus meets the moon, Titan puts in an appearance, and Venus anoints a new moon.
Sky-watchers this week get a chance to go eye to eye with a cosmic scorpion and witness a magnificent meeting of three neighboring worlds in the evening skies.
The lunar wall comes into view, three planets huddle, and the moon joins the Leo constellation in this week’s best sky events.
Straggler meteors, a solar eclipse, and the return of Venus are among the best sky events to watch this week.
Night Sky News: Venus and Jupiter Main Event
Posted by Andrew Fazekas on March 9, 2012 
If you have been watching the early evening skies at all in the last few weeks you probably noticed the two superbright ‘stars’ in the west are drawing closer together by the day. Two of the most brilliant planets in our solar system, Venus and Jupiter, are about to get a lot more cozy in…
Night Sky News: Chance to Spot a Green Giant
Posted by Andrew Fazekas on February 8, 2012 
Thanks to a close encounter with Venus , skywatchers the next few nights get a chance to easily glimpse the 7th planet from the Sun – the green giant Uranus. While the pair of planets will be visible together within the field of view of any standard 7×50 binocular until Feb.15th, Venus and Uranus will…
Night Sky News: Planets Dazzle Holiday Skies
Posted by Andrew Fazekas on December 24, 2011 
This holiday season skywatchers get to witness five planets hanging like ornaments in the skies above. All throughout the end of the month you can catch the five classical naked-eye planets – Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn – all of which were first seen by astronomers in ancient Greek and Roman times. First up…
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If you’re not an early riser, never fear: It’s possible to see some planets even when the sun is shining. Here’s how.
Posted by If you’ve been following the exploits of NASA’s Kepler spacecraft, you probably already know that the mission finds new planets using what’s called the transit method. In short, Kepler stares at a bunch of stars and records when there’s a periodic dip in a star’s light caused by an object passing in front. With enough…
Hot on the heels of The Planets in HD, I see the folks at SEED magazine have a nifty interview with One Ring Zero about their new album, PLANETS, an astronomy-themed rock symphony. We’re still a few years out from the hundredth anniversary of Gustav Holst’s astrology ode, written between 1914 and 1916. But the…
The closer stuff is to the sun, the harder it is to see. —Image courtesy SOHO (ESA & NASA) That’s the fundamental problem with vulcanoids, a hypothetical band of asteroids orbiting between the sun and the closest planet in, Mercury. In fact, for years that was the problem with studying Mercury, since looking at the…
Right now people in the Northern Hemisphere are enjoying the last few weeks when Venus will shine bright in the night. Around the end of March the “evening star” becomes the “morning star,” and the planet won’t grace the dusk skies again until next year. (Read more at EarthSky to find out why Venus makes…
Bored by chocolates and jaded with roses? Give your sweetie the gift of the heavens for Valentine’s Day this year. I’m talking about the Valentine’s Day star, which graces the skies with its brilliant red glow each year in early February. —Image courtesy A. Dupree (CfA), R. Gilliland (STScI), NASA Now, this isn’t exactly a…
I’ve been a baaaad blogger. Headed out to San Francisco for the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union, I had grand ambitions of doing it all: writing stories, editing copy, meeting scientists, hobnobbing with other writers, and of course live blogging from the meeting. Life, it seems, had other plans. But never fear. Now…
Unless you live underground or in a very cloudy part of the world, it was pretty hard to miss the crazy conjunction of Venus and Jupiter Monday night that, when joined by the crescent moon, smiled on one side of Earth while frowning on the other. But as millions of skywatchers reveled in that display,…
[What follows is a guest post from my NG colleague Susan Poulton, who was kind enough to fill in for me while I was enjoying a couple days off for my birthday. Thanks, SP!] And, but, or—they will all get you pretty far, but to witness one of the best sky shows of 2008, you…
On November 20, 1998, a bus-size hunk of electronics poetically named Zarya, Russian for “dawn,” blasted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The module was the first piece of the International Space Station, which after ten years and 29 construction deliveries is the largest spacecraft ever built, comparable in size to a five-bedroom house—albeit…
Whew! Egypt = amazing. I can’t even begin to describe the wonder and awe of standing inside a pyramid or walking the Avenue of the Sphinxes or sailing in a felucca on the Nile. It really is something everyone should do at some point in their lives. The best part is that it seems I…
Surprise! This is Victoria again… Many thanks to Stephen for diving right into the blogosphere with us—his debut here is a totally rad behind-the-scenes look at National Geographic‘s space special issue, which blows me right out of the digital water. Not to interrupt his groove, but I do have one more thing to share before…
Next week me and my mummy are off to visit Egypt, a trip I’ve been looking forward to for more than a year. Sadly, our jam-packed itinerary doesn’t include much computer time, so blogging from the field is not an option. A guard watches over statues of Ramses II in Abu Simbel —Photo by David…
Sometimes it’s possible to be too close to a problem. For example, how would a citizen of Whoville living on a speck of dust know what another speck of dust several light-years away is supposed to look like? The situation is much the same on Earth. Earth, as seen from Mars in 2004 —Image courtesy…
—Image courtesy NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington NASA’s MESSENGER space probe sent some postcards home this morning from its second jaunt past Mercury, that tiny planet nearest to the sun. The flyby is part of some maneuvering MESSENGER has to do to ease itself from orbiting the sun to orbiting Mercury.…
The planets (plus Pluto) in an approximate size, but not distance, comparison —Image courtesy NASA/Lunar and Planetary Laboratory The astronomy gods are giving me a pretty nice birthday present this year: a planetary reunion. On December 1 at 7:36 p.m. ET, Venus and Jupiter will be in conjunction, the astronomical term for “really close together…
