Venus and Uranus ride piggyback this week

You can't miss Venus shining in the western sky during twilight this month. Photo: Bob King

Venus is amazing! The first “star” to come out at night, it blazes in the western sky at nightfall. While we associate clouds with dark days, the perpetual cloud cover of Venus is one of the main reasons it’s so bright. Clouds are great reflectors of light, especially when you’re looking at them from the outside.

The second reason for Venus’ brilliance is how close the planet is to Earth compared to other cloudy planets like Jupiter and Saturn. Jupiter is 11 times larger and would far outshine Venus at the same distance.

These two maps show Venus and Uranus as you'd see them in binoculars facing west during late twilight. They're 4 degrees apart this evening. You can gauge Venus' motion using my "Little Box" of stars, a small pattern of stars in Pisces near the planets. Maps created with Chris Marriott's SkyMap

Only a few weeks ago, Venus and Neptune passed near one another, making it easy to find the faintest planet by way of the brightest. This week Venus meets up with Uranus, creating another wonderful opportunity to see a remote planet with little more than a pair of binoculars.  Because it’s much brighter than Neptune, it’ll be that much easier to see. Just aim your binoculars at Venus in late twilight and use the maps to point you to the right spot. Uranus will look exactly like a star, but a small telescope magnifying around 75x-100x will reveal its tiny, blue-green disk. The maps show stars to magnitude 6.5 – a little fainter than Uranus.

On Thursday around 8 p.m. CST, when both planets are in conjunction and closest together, they’ll only be 0.3 degrees apart. That’s less than one moon diameter. Not only will they look like a “double planet” in binoculars, they’ll both easily fit together in the same field of view of a low power telescope. Definitely an eye-catcher! Despite how close together they’ll appear, Venus will be 99 million miles from Earth and Uranus almost 2 billion. Try to picture that third dimension of space when you’re peering at them through the eyepiece.

Things really get tight on Wednesday and then on Thursday when the two planets are closest. Never has finding Uranus been easier.

The maps show the planets’ positions as you face west around 6:30 p.m. CST. Don’t worry if you’re time is different by a few hours; their positions won’t change much in such a short time.

Notice that Venus continues moving upward and away from the sun this week, while Uranus slowly drops to the west. The reason they will get so close together is that both follow the same path in the sky called the ecliptic. This is also the highway traveled by the sun and moon. When everyone’s driving the same road in and out of town, sooner or later you pass one another. The same happens with the planets and moon as they cruise along the ecliptic through the zodiac constellations.

Tonight Venus and Uranus are separated by about 4 degrees, an amount that easily fits in a typical binocular field of view. That distance shrinks with each passing night. I hope you’ll be able to spot the pair at least once in the coming week. Good luck!