Planet Scenes January 2022
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January 26 Jupiter continues to move rapidly through Aquarius, as we can see in this image on which I have marked its progress eastward in the last twelve days. The star just below and slightly left of Jupiter is σ Aquarii. Jupiter's next destination is λ which it will pass around February 19, although that will likely be too near the Sun to observe. |
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January 24 Venus is rapidly climbing higher in the morning sky after its inferior conjunction on January 8, and owing to its great elevation north of the ecliptic, will soon be higher than Mars. On this morning, Venus was almost 6° 45' above the ecliptic, which is greater than its elevation when it passed north of the Sun. Mars will slide under Venus and just barely get ahead of it in their race eastward, but Venus will soon catch back up and pass Mars on its way to Saturn and then the close conjunction with Jupiter in April. |
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January 14 Our weather in central Virginia was clear and cold this Friday the 14th, so we had a nice view of Saturn and Mercury, dimming and low in the evening twilight, as well as Jupiter much higher to their upper left. Jupiter will spend the first four months of the year moving through Aquarius but come to opposition in late September in southern Pisces, in a very similar manner to its 2010 apparition. |
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January 8 Venus is passing through inferior conjunction sometime today or possibly early on January 9, so around 1:30 EST in central Virginia I was able to view Venus very nicely while blocking the Sun with the roof of my house. I used a 1974 vintage C8 and a 12mm eyepiece for about 166x and took the picture afocally with my iPhone 6. |
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January 7 The evening of January 7 presented skywatchers with an almost perfectly straight line of planets comprising Jupiter - Saturn - Mercury from upper left to lower right, and as one might expect with that close of an alignment, they are all nearly equidistant from the ecliptic, all south of it. In particular in the second image, the more greyish one, the stars of Capricornus can be seen. |
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January 7 No planets in this view, but instead a visit to the southern constellation Centaurus. Tony Flanders wrote an interesting article in the April 2019 issue of Sky & Telescope magazine on Centaurus and Crux, focusing on how much of Centaurus one can see from mid-northern latitudes. So here I wanted to illustrate how much I can see over my low, distant treeline from the latitude of Fredericksburg, Virginia. In this view, the two northern stars of θ and ι have not culminated yet, so potentially a little more of the constellation would be visible an hour beyond this time, but for this time of year, it would be mid-twilight! |
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January 7 While rummaging around in my astronomy cabinets, I discovered my 72mm solar filter for camera lenses, so I decided to try it out on my Nikkor 300mm lens today, since I knew there was a very nice group of sunspots near the center of the Sun. The results were "meh" in my opinion; at 1/800th of second, the color rendition of the Sun was pretty good, but 300mm focal length is just not enough to get a sharp view of the sunspot group with my setup. Better imagers probably could LOL! |
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January 4 Mars is the only morning planet, rising next to Scorpius almost exactly two hours before sunrise, while the other four naked-eye planets are strung out in the evening sky, Jupiter - Saturn - Mercury - Venus from top to bottom. |
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January 3 Nice sunny late afternoon following a 12" snowfall earlier in the day, orange razor-thin crescent Moon, and planet pairings! The only thing I didn't get an image of was Venus' crescent earlier in the evening. |