dipper@utastro.UUCP (Debbie Byrd) (09/18/85)
Look for Saturn near the moon Wednesday evening. We'll tell you how -- after this. September 18 Saturn and the Moon If you look outside tonight, you can see an inconspicuous planet -- Saturn -- the closest bright object to the moon Wednesday evening. Look for Saturn and the moon sometime after the sun goes down. Then they're in the southwestern twilight sky. As Earth turns, the pair sinks toward the horizon -- so that they're not visible for very long this evening. Both Saturn and the moon set by about 9:30. After Saturn and the moon have set, there's still another planet you can easily find on the dome of the evening sky. That planet is Jupiter -- now high in the south around 9:30 -- the brightest object besides the moon in the evening sky. Saturn and Jupiter are gas giant worlds -- huge balls consisting mostly of atmosphere -- two of four such worlds in our solar system. It happens that all four gas giant worlds are now in the evening sky -- though only Saturn and Jupiter are visible to the eye. Uranus and Neptune are located along an imaginary line drawn on the sky between the two brighter planets. If you extend the two-dimensional dome of the sky into three-dimensions, then you can imagine Uranus and Neptune traveling in between Saturn and Jupiter as seen from our vantagepoint on Earth -- in a great procession of giant planets in the outer solar system. But Earth is also moving around the sun -- and as we do our evening sky is turning away away from these planets. By the end of the year, our evening sky will have shifted so much that, of the giants, only Jupiter will remain in the evening sky. Script by Deborah Byrd. (c) Copyright 1984, 1985 McDonald Observatory, University of Texas at Austin