This morning's planets

Let's hear it for Venus! (not to mention Mars and Staurn ;-)

I've been following Venus carefully this year since February, but for some reason it seems much brighter in our morning sky - what a beacon! Yet the cold data shows it is at Magnitude 4.4, a tad dimmer than when I was watching it in the evening sky in late spring.

Up above it, bouncing around the horns of Taurus, is fast-moving Mars. Not too impressive in the telescope yet, but it's a real star trekker. Even a casual observer can detect movement in just a few days, "Planet" means "wanderer" and Mars is really wandering. Mercury is, of course, the speed demon, but you don't really get to see him where there are lots of background stars that highlight his movements the way they do with Mars. And any glance at Mars these days makes me think about those tiny rovers - Opportunity, I believe, is now heading down into a real steep crater, it's camera continuing to send back pictures long, long after it's predicted demise. Even survived thathorrible dust storm that dominated Mars this summer!

And Saturn made me do a double take this morning - quite literally. At 5:15 am it was really looking cool, forming a wide double star with Regulus. At 1.35 Regulus is the last of the first magnitude stars - the next brightest star is 1.5 which make it second magnitude. Saturn right now is magnitude ,7, so it out shines Regulus, but not by a whole lot.

Of course Saturn is just 80 light minutes away - about as far as it gets - and Regulus is 77 light years away. Let's see - 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day, 365.25 days in a year - that makes Regulus about 31,557,600 times farther away from us than Saturn - so Regulus has a right to appear a tad dimmer!

And it's that sense of three dimension that has been exciting me lately as I've checked these planets on several mornings over the past couple weeks. They form a nice arc, reaching up from the eastern horizon - an arc that marks the plane of our solar system. As I stare at them from my vantage point on the third planet, I try to see them from the perspective of an approaching space ship where the plane is all the more obvious. What is interesting is to notice how it cuts across - at a steep angle - the plane of our galaxy as marked by the Milky Way. With the Milky Way as a reference point we're set at a crazy angle - or with us as a reference point, the Milky Way is the crazy one. Of course there is no correct reference point, but these kinds of visualization games are fun.

And when you look at those little specs of dust and frozen gases we call planets - and you understand that even a close star, such as Regulus, is not "right next to them," but 31 million times more distant - then all our efforts - our vaunted space probes and manned flights to the moon - make us look like some sort of cosmic baby, just starting to crawl around our playpen, the solar system! Pride, awe, and humility - a good way to start the day!