Set your alarm and get up early on Sunday, July 19. Approximately 45 minutes before sunrise, you will be able to see five planets and the crescent moon without using a telescope. Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, as well as the moon, will be visible.
Jeffrey Hunt, an astronomy educator and former planetarium director who wrote about the event in a post on his site, When the Curves Line Up, told me about the best way to take a look.
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“Get out early in the morning, at least an hour before sunrise,” said Hunt. “Find all four bright planets: Venus, Mars, Saturn, and Jupiter. They look like too bright stars. Bright Venus is low in the east-northeast. Mars is the lone ‘star’ in the southeast, and Jupiter and Saturn are the stars in the southwest. In your eyes, they won’t look like spacecraft photos, just too bright stars. “
Mercury may be the most difficult to detect. Hunt advises trying Mercury about 45 minutes before sunrise and using binoculars.
On his website, Hunt offers tips for finding each planet. Venus says, “It will burn in the eastern sky.” The thin crescent moon will be very low in the east-northeast part of the sky, and will only be illuminated about 1 percent. Mercury will be to the right of the moon, Mars will be approximately half the sky in the south-southeast, Jupiter will be just above the horizon in the southwest, and Saturn will be in the upper left corner of Jupiter.
Novice astronomers may want to seek technological help. “Google Sky, Night Sky and Star Walk are apps that can help early risers locate planets in the sky,” says Hunt.
The view will be visible in both the Northern Hemisphere and the Southern Hemisphere. From the south of the equator, Hunt observes, Mars is in the northwest rather than the southeast.
If you miss it, you will still be able to see all five planets in the sky for a few additional mornings after July 19, but you won’t see the moon, either.
“On successive mornings, look 3-4 minutes earlier each day,” advises Hunt. “You can catch (the five planets) in the sky until July 25.”
Miss this meeting of the five planets and the moon, and you’ll have to wait a little. The next time we see this meeting in late June 2022, Hunt told me.
This image of Buzz Aldrin on the lunar surface is one of the most iconic in all of NASA history. Half a century has passed since those first steps on the moon, and more than four decades since the last time a human visited him. Both NASA and Elon Musk’s SpaceX say they could put more footprints on the surface in five years, but what about the dozens of other moons that orbit the other planets in our solar system? Click this gallery to take a look at a handful that would also be worth setting foot in.
By the 23rd century, when we are flying around the solar system, it will be necessary to make pit stops somewhere before heading out into deeper space. The Martian moon Phobos is the ideal futuristic gas station. It is a large, asteroid-like body that contains a lot of water that can be used as fuel for your family’s spacecraft. This moon is only 7 miles (11.3 kilometers) wide, with gravity about 100 times weaker than on Earth, perfect for stretching your legs and letting children try their hand dipped in 50-foot-tall basketball hoops. Just make sure they don’t jump too high.
Phobos is used as a gateway to explore Mars on a series of proposed missions by the Planetary Society and others. Alfred McEwen, professor of planetary science at the University of Arizona, said future visitors will want to “explore the disoriented and closed horizons that are distorted by Phobos’ small size and rugged terrain.”
Who says Jupiter’s moon full of volcanoes is a no-go? For years, visitors have walked to the edge of the most active volcano on Earth: Hawaii’s Kilauea. Surely the same draw will take interplanetary tourists to observe Io’s lava and crater-covered hell. Like any good adventurer, just make sure you are prepared with good guidance and equipment to avoid being accidentally vaporized in a boiling kettle, poisoned by the toxic atmosphere, or compromised by the high-radiation environment.
Jupiter’s moon Europa is quite different from Io. Instead of lava, it is covered in smooth ice that hides a salty sea. In certain places, the hidden ocean erupts through cracks in the ice that would make Old Faithful look like a garden sprinkler.
Many suspect that the dark and salty seas of Europe may be one of the best places in the solar system to search for extraterrestrial life. In fact, NASA has already studied the idea of squid-like rovers to explore their depths. By the time humans get there, it might be the best way to move.
Erupting feathers are even more abundant on Enceladus, Saturn’s icy moon. According to Veronica Bray, a lunar and planetary scientist at the University of Arizona: “The groundwater stream probably provides fresh snow for skiing, snowboarding, and sledding, and the downside is the gravitational pull of a moon six times smaller in diameter than Europe it means you can take steeper slopes and get more air. ” She also recommends packing tinted glasses for future distant visits, as Enceladus is the brightest moon in the solar system.
How could we not include the largest moon in the entire solar system? This big boy also orbits Jupiter, and observations suggest he also has his own saltwater underground ocean. Ganymede’s icy crust could be particularly thick, making the hidden sea more difficult to access, but who needs to visit a deep, dark ocean when they can hang out in Ganymede’s oxygen-rich atmosphere and see its glittering spectacles of auroral lights? However, be prepared, even with oxygen, the atmosphere of this moon is still too thin to support life.
For those with a pioneering spirit who don’t care about the dark, Ganymede offers some unique opportunities for the most extreme exploration in history. Just imagine descending for miles through a hole drilled in the moon’s thick layer of ice to explore its alternate layers of water, snow, and ice. Make sure your headlight batteries are charged and your dive tanks are full!
Perhaps nowhere is it more like Earth than Saturn’s moon Titan. But don’t let those picturesque mountains and lakes fool you. That’s not water, it’s highly flammable and stinky methane! Still, with hydrocarbon rain and rivers, this is a world that will be irresistible for future explorers.
Sometimes you just want to take a trip to get away from it all. If that’s the case, you can enjoy a view like this as you navigate Neptune and its largest moon, Triton, on your way to one of its most distant and little-known satellites: Neso. We don’t know much about Neso, except that it is very far from the sun and even from the planet it orbits. It would cost you a lot to kiss you either. But you would have the most pristine peace and quiet of your life while you are satisfied knowing that you have taken the moon to explore everything that can reach our solar system.
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Video: Comet Neowise is passing Earth for the first time in nearly 6,800 years (CBS News)
