Many people have asked me about the parade of planets being widely talked about recently.
Several planets will be nicely on display over the next couple of months, and it’s great to see so many planets in the early evening sky at once.
However, the view will not be as spectacular as some media are making it out to be.
I have added a map below showing the position of the six visible planets on the 30th of the month, but go out a couple of weeks on either side at the same time of night, and the position of the planets will not have changed too much.
Venus in the southwestern sky will probably be the first planet noticed as the sky gets dark, followed by Jupiter, which is fairly high up in our sky.
Mars, the next brightest, is visible, rising over in the eastern sky. As it gets dark, look below Venus, and you’ll see Saturn. The rings are almost edge onto Earth, so they are quite challenging now. However, if you want to observe it with a telescope, be quick as it will set fairly quickly once it gets dark.
Venus now shows a nice, thick crescent phase and a reasonably large disk, which any small telescope can reveal.
Neptune is located just east of Jupiter, but a telescope will be needed to find it, and the low altitude makes it more challenging to spot.
Uranus is high up in the sky in Taurus, but you will need binoculars or a telescope to identify it because it is just below naked-eye visibility.
Uranus and Neptune have extremely small blue-green disks, but resolving them as disks requires a reasonably large telescope.
If you look at Jupiter with binoculars, you should be able to see up to four of the Galilean Moons orbiting around it.
A small telescope will reveal the cloud belts and maybe the great red spot.
Mars has a fairly small disk, so seeing details on the disk will be challenging, but give it a go.
You never know when observing conditions come together briefly for those elusive surface features to snap into view.
Mercury, the only other major planet that isn’t visible, is too close to The Sun to be seen at this time.