by Playfuls Staff |
9th December 2006
In a rare astronomical
phenomenon, planets Jupiter, Mercury and Mars are visible to the naked eye up
to December 14. These planets in conjunction [more] can be seen early Sunday
morning, 40 minutes before sunrise. These three will stage the closest
planetary threesome until the year 2053. Naked-eye viewing is fine, but
binoculars or a telescope are even better. A telescope is not reccomended,
because they will appear to be so close to the Sun that you risk gazing at it
through the telescope and damage your eyesight. Jupiter shines more brilliantly
than any star. With the exception of the Sun, Moon and Venus, Jupiter is the
brightest celestial body in the heavens. If you spot only one point of light by
Jupiter, that’s probably Mercury. It’s considerably brighter than fainter Mars.
About 45 minutes before dawn on
Sunday those three planets will be so close that the average person's thumb can
obscure all three from view. They will be almost as close together on Saturday
and Monday, but Sunday they will be within one degree of each other in the sky.
Three planets haven't been that close since 1925, said Miami Space Transit
Planetarium director Jack Horkheimer quoted by AP.
"Jupiter will be very bright
and it will look like it has two bright lights next to it, and they won't
twinkle because they're planets," said Horkheimer, host of the television
show "Star Gazer. "This is the kind of an event that turns young
children into Carl Sagans."
"When I look at something
like this, I realize that all the powers on Earth, all the emperors, all the
money, cannot change it one iota. We are observers, but the wonderful part of
that is that we are the only species on this planet that can observe it and
understand it," he said, as quoted by AP.
Jupiter is the fifth planet from
the Sun and the largest within the solar system. Jupiter and the other gas
giants—Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune—are sometimes referred to as "Jovian
planets". Jupiter is 2.5 times more massive than all the other planets
combined, so massive that its barycenter with the Sun actually lies above the
Sun's surface (1.068 solar radii from the Sun's center). It is 318 times more
massive than Earth, with a diameter 11 times that of Earth, and its volume is
1300 times as great as that of Earth.
Mercury is the innermost and
smallest planet in the solar system, orbiting the Sun once every 88 days. Comparatively
little is known about the planet: the only spacecraft to approach Mercury was
Mariner 10 from 1974 to 1975, which mapped only 40%–45% of the planet's
surface.
Mars is the fourth planet from
the Sun in our solar system and is named after Mars, the Roman god of war. Mars
is also known as the "Red Planet" due to its reddish appearance when
seen from Earth. The prefix areo-, from the Greek god of war, Ares, refers to
Mars in the same way geo- refers to Earth. Mars has two moons, Phobos and
Deimos, which are small and oddly shaped. These may be captured asteroids
similar to 5261 Eureka,
a Mars Trojan asteroid. Mars can be seen from Earth with the naked eye.
* This article is using information from Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars,
"This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License, which means that you can copy and modify it as long as the entire work (including additions) remains under this license", http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html.
