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Last Wednesday Lynn and I were walking at dusk and, upon turning west, were awe-struck by the crescent of the young moon hanging dramatically next to Venus. Venus is the brightest "star" in the western sky after sunset these days.
In the event you've been busy getting the kids to school, or watching C-SPAN or the NCAA tournament (I had Oklahoma State over Maryland in the final), you might have missed the news that we are in the middle of an amazing lineup of the visible planets. They say it won't be this good again until 2036.
Step outside just after sunset and you can see 'em all, strung in a nearly straight line west to east: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Saturn, Jupiter. (I know, I know, Jupiter comes before Saturn in the solar system, but that's the order in which they're lined up in our sky.)
Mercury is the hardest to see. It is a tiny red fleck, close enough to the sun to still be in the band of dying daylight. To be honest, I've never seen it without a telescope, but the smart guys say it's visible, so it must be.
From our point of view, Venus and Mercury always appear close to the sun. That's because their orbits are inside ours. Sometimes they're evening stars. But let them get around to the other side of their orbit, and they'll rise in the morning sky.
Being inside our orbit, Venus and Mercury also appear to us to have phases, like the moon. Take a closer look at them in a telescope and you might see a half-Venus, or a crescent-Venus. Mercury, to me, just keeps looking like a little red dot.
Speaking of red dots, the next planet in the sky up from Venus is Mars, now a mild speck. Last year at this time the God of War was red and angry, coming closer to us than it had in tens of thousands of years. But we have passed Mars on the inside track and left it far behind us. It's getting smaller in our rear-view mirror, as it were. Another year and we'll be about to lap it.
Don't forget when you look at Mars that we have little robot-guys scooting around on its surface. We even found the residue of a pool of salt water last week. If there was salt water, there could have been life. That means there could have been city of Clearwater officers handing out parking tickets, too.
Saturn is a mustard-yellow star even higher in the southwestern sky. Only with a telescope does the planet reveal its glory. Saturn also is the most fun to watch somebody else see in a telescope for the first time.
Saturn and the moon are the only objects that reveal to me their, you know, their ball-ness - their objecthood, their three-dimensionality. The effect is so striking that I remember the first time having a definite feeling of insecurity, realizing that we all are just kind of hanging in blackness.
Jupiter is the brightest thing in the east after sunset. In the telescope you can see the bands of colors across its disk, at least a couple of them, but the best show are the "Galilean" moons that orbit Jupiter like puppies. It's as if the solar system gave Galileo a diagram saying, "Look, here's a working model."
Remember your grade-school diagram of the solar system, a big flat disc of concentric rings showing the orbits? Stand outside, tilt your head and draw a mental line through these planets again - now you are looking at the plane of the solar system itself, the plane of the ecliptic.
"Wait a minute, star boy," you might be saying. "What's the plane of the ecliptic doing halfway up in my sky?" But remember that Earth itself is tilted at 23.5 degrees, and we Tampa Bay types are hanging out at about 28 degrees north of the equator, so do some math and you get the rough angle of the ecliptic from the horizon. Pretty cool, no?
Yet all this talk about five visible planets is not exactly right. There are six planets visible to us, counting the one we're standing on.
Here we are, right smack between Venus (too hot) and Mars (too cold), with air and weather and a narrow little range of temperature that often lets water stay liquid, which turns out to be a pretty good deal for us, not to mention everybody else hanging out with us, such as my cats and dog, and African swallows, and the mosquito, which I am sure serves some useful purpose. In no way do I seek to impose on your personal philosophy by making the cheerful observation that I am grateful for these factory settings.