Planets

The king of the Solar System takes pride of place, dazzling as the king of the evening sky

PLANET OF THE MONTH

Jupiter is by far the largest planet in our Solar System. It’s a gas giant world so huge that it could easily swallow up Earth a thousand times over with room to spare. The planet has been gracing our evening skies for many months now, looking like a strikingly bright blue-white ‘star’ visible as soon as the Sun has set. But now Jupiter’s dominance of the evening sky is coming to an end. Its brightness is decreasing, and the length of time it’s visible in the sky each evening is decreasing too. It’s worth getting some views in while you can.

At the start of our observing period Jupiter will still be a strikingly bright ‘evening star’ shining low in the southwest as the Sun sets, and it won’t set for six more hours after that, giving amateur astronomers and stargazers plenty of time to enjoy looking at its many moons and the storm systems in its atmosphere. Jupiter will be very close to much fainter and much more distant Uranus in the sky too. On 22 February the two planets will appear less than ten degrees apart in the sky, even though they’ll be separated by billions of kilometres of space in actuality. By the end of our observing period the two words will be only half as far apart in the sky at just five degrees, so they might fit into the same field of view of binoculars if they are low powered.