A great grouping in the pre-dawn sky: the three brightest planets and the extremely slender Moon.
Alas, they’re too low for us in the northern hemisphere, because they are on the part of the ecliptic that slopes south from the celestial equator. It’s better for southerners.
See the end note about enlarging illustrations.
The planets are on the morning, or western, side of the Sun. Here’s a detail from my elongation graph for the year – a diagram that sums up the moving bodies’ gyrations around the Sun.
The upper part is distance into westward or morning sky, the lower half, evening. You can see that the planets, except Mars, are on the morning side, experiencing conjunctions with each other, and things will stay that way till Venus and Mercury cross behind the Sun in April.
To sum up the chain of events (you can see more detail in our “Astronomical Calendar web page (see the link at the top):
Feb 8 Mon 14h Universal Time: Mercury at inferior conjunction with the Sun
Feb 10 Wed 13h: Moon 3.4° south of Saturn
Feb 10 Wed 16h: Moon, Venus, and Saturn within circle of diameter 5.18°
Feb 10 Wed 23h:Moon 3.1° south of Venus
Feb 10 Wed 23h: Moon, Venus, and Jupiter within circle of diameter 3.57°
Feb 10 Wed 24h:Moon 3.6° south of Jupiter
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ILLUSTRATIONS in these posts are made with precision but have to be inserted in another format. You may be able to enlarge them on your monitor. One way: right-click, and choose “View image”, then enlarge. Or choose “Copy image”, then put it on your desktop, then open it. On an iPad or phone, use the finger gesture that enlarges (spreading with two fingers, or tapping and dragging with three fingers). Other methods have been suggested, such as dragging the image to the desktop and opening it in other ways.
Sometimes I make improvements or corrections to a post after publishing it. If you click on the title, rather than on ‘Read more’, I think you are sure to see the latest version.
This weblog maintains its right to be about astronomy or anything under the sun.
Thank you. Great illustrations. Yes, an amazing sight in the early morning sky from the Western Cape of South Africa
We got a view of the crescent moon, Saturn and Venus, plus a faint glimpse of Jupiter, this morning (10 February) from Bicheno, on the eastern coast of Tasmania.