This Weekend’s Night Sky (10-11 January 2015) Comet C/2014 Q2 Lovejoy moves into the constellation of Taurus this weekend and has now reached 4th magnitude, about as bright as it is likely to get. Whilst theoretically this means it should be visible to the naked eye it can be pretty challenging to spot, so binoculars will be your best bet to find it. Whilst the Moon will still be pretty bright this weekend, it is beginning to rise later (around 11:23 pm on Saturday and 11:52 pm on Sunday) giving us a bit more time to spot Comet Lovejoy in a dark moonless sky. Sadly from around mid January onwards Comet Lovejoy moves progressively further north and won’t be visible from here in the New Zealand. Now’s the time to catch a glimpse if you can. Mercury and Venus are low in the south-western evening twilight, with Mars a little above and to the right. Jupiter continues its journey into our evening skies rising towards the north east around 10:30pm. With binoculars you may be able to see up to 4 of Jupiter’s largest moons – Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto – as little bright dots either side of the planet, and see how their positions move and change from night to night. These moons are known as the Galilean moons as they were first discovered by Galileo Galilei when he turned his newly invented telescope up to the sky in 1609-1610. The discovery of these moons orbiting a body in the solar system other than our own planet provided a key piece of evidence that the Earth was not, in fact, at the centre of the Universe as most people believed at the time. Sky chart courtesy of Sky and Telescope, turn it upside down for a southern hemisphere view.
Posted on: Fri, 09 Jan 2015 01:18:30 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015