Melbourne sky chart showing evening line up of all 5 naked-eye planets

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LINE UP OF THE FIVE NAKED-EYE PLANETS IN OUR NIGHT SKIES

(13 August, 2016)

The naked-eye planets are the five planets closest to Earth - Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. They are all visible to the naked eye and have been known to humanity since very ancient times.

As can be seen from the first picture, which is an orrery view of the current configuration of our solar system, those five planets are all on the same side of Earth at present, which does not occur often. This means that, for a while, there will now be some periods of a few days at a time when we can see all five of them at once in the night sky, lined up along the ecliptic (the curved yellow line in the sky chart). Right now, they will be visible (weather permitting) from Melbourne in the early evening just after sunset, as shown in pictures 2 and 3.

Pictures 2 and 3 are sky charts for Melbourne for Sunday, 13 August, 2016, just before sunset. It shows where those five naked-eye planets, which are labelled on the chart, will be at that time in Melbourne's sky.

In those sky charts:

- The bold green line is the Melbourne observer's local meridian.

- The faint green grid lines are the altitude and azimuth grid of the observer's visible sky looking almost directly northward (the view is centred just slightly west of north).

- The white line is the celestial equator. (Below it is the celestial northern hemisphere, and above it is the celestial southern hemisphere.)

- The yellow line is the ecliptic, the path of the Sun's apparent annual motion around our sky. The Sun, Moon and all of our solar system planets are always somewhere along that line or very close to it.

- The Sun can be seen setting in the north west near the bottom left corner of the chart.

The later you look in the evening, the closer all objects in the chart will be to setting in the western part of the sky.

The orrery picture is one of the views displayed by the free program, Home Planet for Windows, by John Walker of Fourmilab. Also available on his website is a suite of other, astronomy-related programs.

The sky charts are from the program Sky Gazer by Carina Software.

Thanks to Dr Tanya Hill for the above information about the planetary line up, which she explained on ABC Radio Melbourne, AM 774. Dr Hill is the astronomer at Melbourne's planetarium.

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