Look Up At The Sky This Week And You’ll Be Able To Easily Spot Uranus
We had the most amazing chance to see a rare surprise in the night sky last month, the wonderful conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in 2020. One of the very few genuinely awesome things that happened in 2020.
For another neat sighting in the night sky, head outdoors around 1-2 hours after sunset tonight. We will have an “easy opportunity” to spot the encounter between the Moon, Uranus, and Mars, according to NASA!
Everything you need to have in order to experience this beauty is to have a pair of handy binoculars or a small telescope. If you’re one of the lucky ones that live in an area of extremely dark skies, you can try to see it with your naked eyes.
Mars and Uranus will be in conjunction from January 19-21. This means that they will appear extremely close in the sky.
You can see Uranus, Mars and the moon get close in a rare night sky sight tonight https://t.co/e5kb0KpZno pic.twitter.com/WjCO820brg
— SPACE.com (@SPACEdotcom) January 21, 2021
On January 20, the Moon will be in its first-quarter. This means that it will be quite bright, but not too bright to outglare our Earth. On January 21, on the other hand, Uranus will be 1.75 degrees south of Mars. This means that it is going to be very bright and visible above the Moon.
Uranus is on a whopping 2.9 billion kilometers distance from the Sun. This star’s orbit takes 84 years to complete. About once a year, the planet aligns with Earth and this time around it can be seen flying alongside Mars.
For all the people interested in getting a decent view of the planet nearest to the sun, the sky should be fairly clear on Saturday evening.
We have one more heavenly thing to finish off the month!
We have a full moon on the 28th of January. It is called the Wolf Moon or the Old Moon, or at least that’s why people call it.
Sources:
kgw.com
express.co.uk