What's Up This Weekend?

Saturn and an Interplanetary Traveler

I hope you have had time to get out and watch the moon pass Venus the last couple of evenings. The sky has been absolutely beautiful.

This weekend you might want to start following a couple of solar system objects. The first is the planet Saturn. Over the next five months, you can see Saturn rise and move across the sky earlier and earlier. Also over those five months, Saturn's rings will "open up" from it's current nearly edge on view.

Right now, Saturn rises before 9 p.m. Give it a couple of hours to get high enough for good observing and take a peek through stabilized binoculars or a telescope. Through even a small telescope there will be no doubt that you are looking at Saturn. It will look like someone slipped a photo behind the eyepiece, rings and all. Through a telescope look for the second largest moon of the solar system, Titan, hanging around near Saturn as an orange-ish "star." Saturn looks like a cream-colored bright "star" below the tail of the constellation of Leo the Lion.

It seems that every year a comet passes Earth and flirts with becoming visible to the unaided eye. This year isn't any different. A couple of Chinese comet hunting teams found this year's comet, Comet Lulin. In February it should reach unaided-eye visibility as seen from a reasonably dark location. Whether it gets that bright, it already looks obvious in binoculars or a telescope as a fuzzy object. (Typically comets look better in the wide field of view of binoculars.) Start watching Comet Lulin now and watch it brighten and move across the background of stars. The comet glides through the constellation of Libra the Scales for the next couple of weeks on its way to a rendezvous with Saturn. Here's a map of the comet's progress through Valentine's Day.

Till next time, clear skies.