Summer begins at 10:58 A.M. Eastern today (Wednesday, June 21), and Nature won’t waste any time at all in giving us a welcoming celestial show. Just after the Sun goes down, we’ll see Mars, Venus, and the Moon together pretty well up off the horizon, forming a small triangle to decorate the first evening of the season.
Any time Mars and Venus appear close to each other in the night sky, Mars looks rather small. Legend has it that Mars is overcome by Venus’ beauty when he approaches her, and so he stands back. Or maybe the dude simply understands that when Venus wants to assert herself, it’s best to keep a low profile.
Well, the practical reason Mars looks smaller at these times is that Venus is closer to the Sun than we are, while Mars is farther away, so if these two planets appear close to each other from our vantage point, we must be looking across our own orbit at a fairly distant Mars. That’s what’s going on now, as you see here:
You may have noticed that Venus has been pretty high in the sky after sunset the last couple of months, and if you’re more observant than I am, you might also have noticed that Venus and Mars have gradually been getting closer together. (They’ll keep doing that until around July 5 and then start slowly separating again.)
Seeing Venus and Mars together in the sky is already a lovely treat, but just in time to kick off summer, the Moon will hurry in to join the party:
It’s an appealing show that you won’t have to stay up late to see. You might even still be hanging around outside anyway. In fact, the display starts to get interesting even before sunset, as Gary Seronik writes in the June issue of Sky & Telescope Magazine (yes, the print one, which still exists!):
You can try a fun experiment by starting your viewing session just before sunset. At that time, you’ll easily be able to spot the Moon, but how much later will Venus first appear? You might be surprised to find you can see the Evening Star even when the Sun is still up. Certainly, binoculars will make easy sport of it. What about Mars? Given that the Red Planet is so much fainter than Venus, you’ll need substantially darker conditions before the celestial triangle is complete. In fact, several stars will emerge before then — including 1.4-magnitude Regulus, positioned some 11° upper right of Mars, in Leo.
While you’re taking in the view, look closely at the Moon, because conditions will be pretty good to catch some Earthshine — that is, Earth’s own reflected sunlight reflecting back at us off the Moon’s unlit portion.
One nice thing about this spectacle is that most of us in the U.S. and Canada won’t have too many clouds to get in the way. As of 11 P.M. Tuesday night, the forecast cloud cover in the approach to sunset for some selected cities:
City |
Cloud cover (%) |
Montréal, Que. |
10 |
New York, N.Y. |
93 (sorry) |
Boston, Mass. |
37 |
Atlanta, Ga. |
65 |
New Orleans, La. |
19 |
Chicago, Ill. |
31 |
Toronto, Ont. |
2 |
Denver, Colo. |
42 |
Seattle, Wash. |
35 |
Los Angeles, Calif. |
3 |
Honolulu, Hawaii |
12 |
San Juan, P.R. |
43 |
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I must say I have never tried looking for Venus in daylight, but the Moon provides a handy guide in this event, so I think I’ll give it a shot. I hope you can get out tomorrow evening and enjoy the show as well, and I’d like to join Venus, Mars, and the Moon in wishing you many auspicious summer evenings to come.