Four of the five bright planets are visible in the morning sky. After a close conjunction with each other on the last day of April, Venus and Jupiter will part ways in May. The two dazzlers will be nearly 30 degrees apart by the end of the month.
Jupiter will reach Mars by the 29th. On the 18th, Mars will pass just to the south of Neptune, so you can see it with good binoculars and telescopes. The morning object is positioned far to the west of Venus, Jupiter and Mars.
Mercury shines low in the west-northwest sky right after sundown and keeps company with the nearby star cluster, first-magnitude Aldebaran and a very thin crescent moon. Mercury will disappear in the first week of May. It will join the other four planets in the early morning sky next month.
When measuring the separation between two objects, the length of your clenched fist is roughly 10 degrees. Here, we present a schedule that will show you where to look to see some of the best planet viewing times.
Mercury begins the month in a dark sky just a few minutes after the end of evening twilight. On May 1st, it shines at magnitude +0.7, just a bit brighter than orange Aldebaran, and is easily found to the lower right of that star. binoculars or a wide-field telescope will reveal the pretty sight of the Pleiades centered only about 2 degrees to the right of this fast planet.
The moon will join the array on the following evening, sitting 4 degrees to Mercury's upper left. The planet appears about one-fourth illuminated and in the days that follow, as its crescent phase thins, Mercury rapidly fades to magnitude +1.6 by the 6th; a couple of nights later the planet can no longer be seen.
Mercury enters the morning sky on the 22nd after passing through an inferior conjunction between the sun and Earth.
As May opens, Venus and Jupiter are back where they left off at the end of April, mimicking a double planet low in the eastern dawn sky. skywatchers at mid-northern latitudes will be able to see the two planets rise around the beginning of dawn and will be about 12 degrees high in the east around half an hour before sunrise. Jupiter will be coming up at 2:30 a.m. Daylight-saving time in the mornings and will be descending toward the west by the end of the month. As dawn breaks, Venus will rise, all the way through August.
On the 25th, the moon will be 5 degrees to the lower left of Jupiter, and Jupiter will be 2.5 degrees to the left of Mars. The moon will be 3.5 degrees to the left of Venus. On the morning of the 29th, Mars and Jupiter are in conjunction with each other.
Every morning since the beginning of the year, Mars rises 30 minutes before the first light of dawn in May. Since then, Mars has doubled in brightness, and traveled eastward from Sagittarius through Capricornus into Aquarius. The red planet is not much to look at through a telescope. It is a gibbous ball that even in moderately large telescopes appears as an orange speck.
On May 18th, the red planet will be passing by the most distant planet in the solar system. Neptune will appear as a bluish star, only about 1/ 700 as bright as Mars, with large binoculars or a telescope. Mars will have a close rendezvous with Jupiter in the predawn hours of the 29th.
As dawn begins in eastern Capricornus, the sun shines in the southeast. During the early hours of the morning on May 22nd, you will see a bright yellow-white star hovering 5 degrees above the last quarter moon.
The instructor and guest lecturer at New York's Hayden Planetarium is Joe Rao. He writes about astronomy for a number of publications. Follow us on social media.
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