Look at Uranus! The ice giant is ready to make a rare appearance tonight as it hangs between the moon and Mars
- The ice giant makes a rare appearance after the sunset on January 20th
- To see Uranus, look for Mars, and then slowly analyze toward the crescent moon
- You may need binoculars, but it should look like a faint blue disc
- Mercury comes into view in the second two weeks of January, according to NASA
Uranus will be in sight for the world to see tonight.
NASA reports that the ice giant will be able to be seen on January 20 just hours after dusk.
The seventh planet of the Sun shines on the edge of visibility to the naked eye, especially in areas with light pollution, so it is notoriously difficult to see.
But observers with a telescope or binoculars should be able to observe it hanging in the night sky between the Moon and Mars.
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Uranus will be visible from Earth as a faint bluish disk between the Moon and Mars after sunset in January 2020
“That night, you find the crescent moon and the red planet a couple of hours after it gets dark,” advises NASA’s What’s Up sky observation guide.
Mars will stand out in the night sky with an orange and reddish hue near the moon, according to Axel Diaz, NASA’s ambassador for the solar system.
“People say you can’t find the planet Uranus; it’s very hard to find, it’s very weak, it’s very small,” Diaz says.
The best way to find her is to look at the moon. Look at the moon and look at Mars.
Wednesday also sees a first quarter moon that was already well above the horizon at dusk.
In the northern hemisphere of the Moon, craters like Aristotle, Atlas, and Hercules should be easy to spot.
And tonight, Pisces will be visible near the border it shares with the constellations of Cetus and Aries.
About 1.82 million kilometers from us, Uranus has so far only been visited by a single Earth spacecraft, NASA’s Voyager 2, in 1986.
This may not be so bad: a 2018 report from Oxford University confirmed that hydrogen sulfide gas orbiting its upper atmosphere gives Uranus a fetid stench of rotten eggs.
“If any unfortunate human could descend through the clouds of Uranus, they would encounter very unpleasant and olfactory conditions,” warned astronomer Patrick Irwin.
What’s worse, NASA says the magnetic bubble surrounding Uranus is channeling its harmful atmosphere into space.
The atmospheric loss is due to the trajectory of the planet’s magnetic field that makes the magnetosphere tremble “like a badly thrown football,” the agency said in a statement last spring.
This causes parts of Uranus’ atmosphere to scatter in charged plasma bubbles, called plasmoids, which are pinched by the magnetic field as it moves through the Sun.
Scientists have determined that the plasmoid around Uranus measures about 127,000 miles by 250,000 miles and that it has removed 15 to 55 percent of the planet’s Uranus atmosphere.
The seventh planet of the Sun shines on the edge of visibility to the naked eye, especially in areas with light pollution, so it is notoriously difficult to see. But observers with a telescope or binoculars should be able to observe it hanging in the night sky between the Moon and Mars.
For a little less odious astronomy, NASA also indicated that Mercury will come to light in the last two weeks of January.
Mercury has very little atmosphere and would not smell much.
You need a clear view to the west to see the planet, as it will appear a few degrees above the horizon after sunset, starting in the middle of the month.
“This small planet orbits much closer to the Sun than to Earth, meaning it also orbits the Sun much faster, completing its” year “about a quarter of the time it takes the Earth to orbit. “, according to the agency.
“That’s why we get a chance to see Mercury in the sky every three months or so, as it seems to launch from one side of the Sun to the other.”