Heads Up! Look At Saturn Tonight!

For those of you on Earth tonight, it will be a great time to spot the planet Saturn just after dark. (For those of you not on Earth, please contact me immediately about how I can join you.) It doesn’t matter where you are, east or west, north or south – if you have a sunset today and can see the moon (i.e., if it’s not cloudy and/or pouring rain and/or you’re indoors), you can spot Saturn.

Saturn will be very near the moon tonight after sunset, and the moon is a honkin’ big bright thing that’s easy to spot, so that will make Saturn easy to spot. To the naked eye Saturn will look like a bright, slightly yellowish colored star very close to the Moon.

Here’s a link to an online, interactive sky chart from Astronomy Magazine if you need help or want more detailed information.

In a pair of decent binoculars you should be able to at least see some elongation and possibly even some of the rings of Saturn. (And in binoculars, the Moon is fantastic, particularly along the terminator, the line between light & dark.)

If you have a telescope of any size, you can easily see the rings of Saturn – the bigger the telescope, the better the view.

Even if it is cloudy or pouring rain or you’re stuck indoors tonight, don’t fret – Saturn’s not moving much (from our point of view), although the moon is, so Saturn will still be there tomorrow and Friday and next week and into July. You just won’t have the moon right next to it every night to serve as a viewing guide.

And tomorrow we’ll get a view back at us from Saturn. The Cassini spacecraft will pass through Saturn’s shadow and will take a picture of Saturn’s night side and eclipsed rings, which will also show the “pale, blue dot” that is Earth from 851 million miles.

So remember to look up and wave tomorrow at about 2:30 PM PDT! Smile and say, “Cheese!”

14:50 PDT UPDATE: So that whole “tomorrow at about 2:30” thing for waving at Saturn. It seems that me and about half the Twitterverse got that wrong. The article quoted above quite clearly says “July 19th”, as in “July” and not “June”. So reset your alarms for next month, OK? (But still go look at Saturn near the moon tonight, or tomorrow, or Friday…)