Can you see saturn tonight

Your best chance might be 30 or 40 minutes before sunrise. Watch through the evening as this pattern moves lower toward the west-southwest, gradually rotating a bit clockwise as it goes. Saturn shines more modestly to their right at dusk, and to their lower right later as shown above. At magnitude 7. Aldebaran and the Hyades are well up in the east by 9 p.

Robert C. Victor points out to us that on the nights of November and , "Ceres is passing north of the naked-eye pair Theta-1 and Theta-2 Tauri," a landmark pair of Hyads just west of Aldebaran. The 5. On November 12, Ceres passes within 9 arcminutes north of 75 Tauri. This conjunction takes place in the afternoon in North America, with Ceres moving west by 12 arcminutes per day. Its little constellation Lyra extends to its left, pointing as always to Altair, the brightest star in the southwest.

Three of Lyra's stars near Vega are interesting doubles. Epsilon forms one corner of a roughly equilateral triangle with Vega and Zeta Lyrae. Binoculars easily resolve Epsilon. And Delta Lyrae, upper left of Zeta by a similar distance, is a much wider and easier binocular pair.

M ercury is deeper down in the sunrise glow every morning. Look for it low above the east-southeast horizon about 30 or 40 minutes before sunrise. At least it's currently bright, about magnitude —0. By the end of the week it'll probably be out of sight. Venus , a brilliant magnitude —4. It's now encroaching into the vastly fainter Sagittarius Teapot. Venus doesn't set now until about an hour after dark.

It will continue to shine a little higher and brighter through the end of November. Bring binoculars. Jupiter is the bright one at magnitude —2. In twilight they're just beginning to tilt. As evening advances they tilt more steeply and move westward. Saturn sets around 10 p. Uranus magnitude 5.

Neptune magnitude 7. All descriptions that relate to your horizon — including the words up, down, right, and left — are written for the world's mid-northern latitudes. Descriptions that also depend on longitude mainly Moon positions are for North America. Standard time begins Sunday Nov. Want to become a better astronomer? Learn your way around the constellations. They're the key to locating everything fainter and deeper to hunt with binoculars or a telescope.

This is an outdoor nature hobby. Once you get a telescope, to put it to good use you'll need a detailed, large-scale sky atlas set of charts. The basic standard is the Pocket Sky Atlas in either the original or Jumbo Edition , which shows stars to magnitude 7.

Next up is the larger and deeper Sky Atlas The next up, once you know your way around, are the even larger Interstellarum atlas stars to magnitude 9. Two weeks after this there will be the sister solar eclipse on 4 December.

The premier public astronomy event of the year, Astrofest, is back! Astrofest is a free event for anybody and everybody, and you should definitely save the date and make plans to attend. Be led on a live tour of the night sky, talk to professional astronomers, build a LEGO telescope and enjoy the stage shows! Find out more on the Astronomy WA website. But this successful deployment was followed by two nail-biting weeks as people on the ground were unable to receive any communications from the satellite.

They finally detected signals late in the month and are now working hard to get the satellite up to full capacity. Image: What a view! Binar-1 is too small to be seen from the ground with your eyes, but you can track it down if you are a keen radio enthusiast and it is on a similar orbit to the International Space Station.

You can use this website to help you figure out the best time to see the ISS passing overhead. Satellites in low earth orbit like the ISS and Binar-1 move more than 7km per second.

Venus is looking glorious in the western sky in the evenings. Because of the way the orbits line up , it is backdropped by the centre of the Milky Way in Sagittarius right now, and in the first week of November its path will take it almost right through the middle, as seen from Earth.

This is of course an observational effect, the black hole itself is 26, light years away, but you can use Venus as a reference point. Jupiter is still looking nice and bright, high in the evening skies. It reaches eastern quadrature on 15 November, which means at sunset on this date it will lie exactly along a line drawn north to south in the sky. Seen from above, lines drawn from the Sun to Earth and from Earth to Jupiter will meet at a right angle.

Another way of thinking about this is if you point one hand at the setting sun and the other at Jupiter, your arms will make a right angle. Aries is a medium-sized constellation and part of the Zodiac, meaning that it lies along the ecliptic which you will be able to trace out using the instructions above.

It is visible in the northern sky in the mid-evenings during November, and is recognised as the gently curving set of stars representing the ram and its horns. The brightest star in this constellation is Hamal, a giant star that has used up all the fuel in its core and is now in the process of fusing hydrogen in layers around the middle. The location of fusion away from the core of the star causes its outer layers to heat up and expand, and ultimately cool the star down a little, turning it a reddish colour.

The ram appears in many stories of mythology, perhaps the most well known being the bearer of the golden fleece which was made from its hide, serving as the basis for one of the trials of Jason and his crew of Argonauts. This story is also recorded in the gigantic asterism of Argo Navis, these days broken into the constellations of Vela, Puppis and Carina — visible in the south east at the same time as Aries is up in the north.

Always guaranteed to get a lame laugh, this planet gets its name from the primordial Greek God of the Sky. It should appear as a greenish-blue source through a medium-sized telescope. Uranus is technically the first planet ever discovered. The other naked eye planets Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn have been known since antiquity, while Uranus is recorded as being discovered on 13 March Its long orbit and great distance from us mean it requires many observations or powerful equipment to see the signs that this point of light in the sky is an entire world.

No matter how, the result is that seasons on Uranus last for decades at a time. The local claim to fame is that observations performed at Perth Observatory helped confirm the discovery of the rings of Uranus. The planet was predicted to pass in front of a distant star and block out the light received.

Astronomers noticed that in addition to the expected drop in starlight from the planet being in the way, there were also dips in starlight observed just before and just after Uranus blocked the star: tell-tale signs of a ring system around the planet obstructing the starlight. Images: Elliot and Nicholson.

Uranus continues to play an intriguing role in models of solar system evolution. It seems like something that belongs in a movie: An asteroid is headed towards Earth — can we deflect it by flying a big heavy spaceship into it to push it off course and save the planet?

Taking off on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, it will speed towards the double asteroid Didymos. To be clear, Didymos and Dimorphos are not on a collision course with Earth, we are safe for now. Asteroids can be tricky to study, and their widely varying composition makes it difficult to extrapolate data from one study to the next.

Image: DART. Travelling to an altitude of km, this carries travellers well above the Karman line , the internationally agreed edge of space. Polar day. Loading stars Mercury rise and set in New York Fairly close to the Sun.

Visible around sunrise and sunset only. Mercury Time:. Venus rise and set in New York View after sunset. Venus Time:. Mars rise and set in New York Fairly close to the Sun. Mars Time:. Jupiter rise and set in New York View after sunset. Jupiter Time:. Saturn rise and set in New York View after sunset.