Plenty of Planets!

Now is a great time to feel that you are part of the solar system. Venus, Mars, Saturn and the Moon are all visible in the evening sky. As you can see in the photograph I took a few nights ago (below), all the planets lie along a line called the ecliptic, which goes to show just how flat our solar system is. (Just hover your mouse over the image for labels)

Our solar system is like a big flat pancake! Imagine the Earth sitting on that pancake, along with the rest of the planets. The grid marks where that pancake (the flat plane of our solar system) goes out into space, and so where all the planets can be found. The constellations of Leo (top left) and Gemini (bottom right) are also shown.

The following animation shows just how it looks from the ground and from above the solar system.

The Night Sky for May, 2010

This month is a great month for planets! If you go out on a dark night you can see and feel for yourself how we are part of the solar system.

Look low in the west, half an hour after sunset, you can see Venus - the brightest object in the sky after the Sun and Moon. Now wave your arms around in an arc going from Venus low in the west, over the south and then towards the south-east, and you will bump into two more planets in the night sky – the red planet Mars, and Saturn which is yellowish in colour.

Ancient people knew of the planets Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn because they are all so easy to see with your own eyes - they are all bright objects that can even be seen through our light polluted skies. However, Mercury cannot be seen at the moment since it is too close to the Sun (Mercury passed between us and the Sun on the 28th of April), and Jupiter is above the morning side of the Earth, and so we can only see Jupiter very early in the morning.

But do take a look for Venus, Mars and Saturn, the bright planets in this months evening sky. They are forming a beautiful arc across the night sky, which really highlights that we live close to the centre of the very flat solar system.

More International Space Station fly-pasts...

The International Space Station will be visible flying over the UK for another week (before it starts flying over in daytime), so do take a look... and don't forget to wave at the six astronauts currently on board as they fly overhead!

The space station orbits the Earth every 96 minutes, but for us to clearly see it, the ISS needs to fly over at dawn and dusk. We see the space station thanks to sunlight reflecting off it, mainly off the huge solar panels the size of a football field. If it flies overhead in the daytime, the sky is too bright for us to see it; and if it flies over head at night, then the station is in the shadow of the Earth, and so we can't see any reflected sunlight.

For the next week, we are lucky - on some nights we can see the ISS fly overhead on two consecutive orbits, one 96 minutes after the other.

Date	Starts			Maximum height			Ends
	Time	Alt.	Az.	Time	Alt.	Az.	Time	Alt.	Az.
5 May	21:01:04	10	W	21:04:00	86	NW	21:07:00	10	E
5 May	22:36:23	10	W	22:39:22	82	N	22:40:16	41	E
6 May	21:26:09	10	W	21:29:07	73	N	21:32:05	10	E
6 May	23:01:26	10	WNW	23:04:09	62	SW	23:04:09	62	SW
7 May	21:51:11	10	W	21:54:10	83	N	21:56:30	15	E
8 May	20:40:53	10	W	20:43:51	73	N	20:46:49	10	E
8 May	22:16:10	10	W	22:19:07	63	SSW	22:20:18	31	SE
9 May	21:05:51	10	W	21:08:49	85	N	21:11:47	10	E
9 May	22:41:13	10	W	22:43:54	32	SSW	22:44:03	32	SSW
10 May	21:30:45	10	W	21:33:41	61	SSW	21:36:19	12	ESE
11 May	21:55:44	10	W	21:58:24	31	SSW	22:00:02	18	SSE
13 May	21:10:07	10	W	21:12:45	29	SSW	21:15:22	10	SSE