Venus and Mars and a little more

Planets Venus and Mars above the western horizon at 23:00 (11pm) on May 1st (2023), along with some of the brighter stars against the dark blue velvet sky. It doesn’t get fully dark here at this time of year (I’m at 60° north), so usually only the brightest ones shine through (and in the middle of summer, you’ll be lucky to spot just three).

For those who don’t know, but would like to: planets are there, right in front of your eyes, if you only look up. Not counting the Earth, which is a pretty obvious one because you’re likely to be standing on it, there are five planets that you should be able to spot with your unaided eyes, even without binoculars, as long as the sky is clear and your surroundings aren’t too bright (I’m talking about lights, not people, but I digress): Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. For Uranus and Neptune, however, you’d need a decent telescope. The planets will appear to wander among the stars, their positions changing slightly from one night to the next, as they and we move relative to each other in our respective orbits around the Sun. Some times, some nights, you may see just one, then other nights there could be several. On this particular night, Venus and Mars were in view, as they have been for several nights past, and they will be for several nights to come. There are free websites and programs and mobile apps that can show you where in the sky you may find them, and when. Stellarium is one of them, which I use a lot. Happy hunting!

“Lens Flare” may look like a nebula, but of course it isn’t; it’s just a regular lens flare from a bright lamp sitting just below the photo, but with everything else going on in the sky, I found that it’d make sense to point it out.

The California Nebula, however, is an actual nebula, about 1000 light years away, and if it had been visible to the unaided eye we would’ve seen a glowing, slightly California-shaped, red cloud about four to five full moons long.

The sky isn’t just full of the wonderful and mysterious things we can see, it is even fuller of all kinds wonderful and mysterious things that we can’t, at least not without a little help.