Me and my son have been wanting to go to the Natural History Museum for weeks now to look through the telescope at the observatory in the Planetarium to see the planetary line up.
Last week and the week before, our neighbor (who with her daughter will take us as she has a car)
said she had to wait cause of finances.
Well.
Some teacher person came up to me in school today and said my son had won some raffle.
The prize?
4 free admissions to the Natural History Museum!
Yay!!!
We get to go. Free!
Hopefully, it will be uncloudy next Wednesday.
Cool! How long is the line-up continuing? Is it visible to the naked eye?
Yes! it is visible, especially through the telescope they have.
Its Venus, Mars, Jupiter AND Saturn.
All in a row.
I’ve never seen the rings around Saturn.
I’m not sure how long the line up will still be there, but it’s definitely visible to the naked eye. Look low in the western sky at about dusk. You’ll see one very bright star - that’s Venus. If you look up and down in a sort of diagonal line running from SW to NW, you’ll see Jupiter in the SW, then Saturn, Mars, Venus, and Mercury. Mars and Mercury are quite faint, and if I’m remembering correctly, Mars isn’t quite in the line up. It’s a little off, but not more than a degree or so.
If you look at 'em through a pair of binoculars, you’ll see color in each of the planets, and Saturn will look elliptical. If you have any sort of telescope or spotting scope, even an inexpensive one, you can see Saturn’s rings. They’re a lot easier to see than most people think.
Somebody, maybe Pucette?, sent me this cool Astronomy link. It let’s you plub in your location and you can see where the planets will be by the time. Only tricky part is figuring out the offset from Greenwich time. You can also set it only show where the planets are.
Thanks, everybody! Have fun vanilla!