Mercury Transit!

I hope you had a chance to see the Mercury transit! It was close where I was: overcast skies and some drizzle, then patches of blue sky visible far to the northwest (darn, exactly the wrong direction!), slowly moving this way ... oh, the drama! In the end, the sky around the sun finally cleared about five minutes before ingress and stayed clear for the rest of the day.

The next transit is Venus, which will cross in front of the sun in June of 2012 (not 2021 as I wrote last month — sorry for the typo!) It’s still a long wait, but at least our June weather should be a lot more reliable.

Getting back to the current time, it’s a quiet month for planet observers. The dominant planet in our December 2006 evening skies is Saturn. The ringed planet rises around 9pm and so is an easy target for observing, though it doesn’t transit until well after midnight.

Saturn’s rings are closing up: down to 12.5 degrees, quite a bit narrower than they were earlier this year. We won’t see them actually “edge on” until 2009.

Mercury puts on a good show in the mornings of the first two weeks of December. On the 10th, look for a very close grouping of gibbous Mercury, Jupiter and Mars. They should all fit fairly comfortably in the field of a low powered eyepiece, with less than a quarter of a degree separating Mercury and Jupiter, and Mars about a degree away from the pair.

Uranus and Neptune are still visible in the early evening, with Uranus setting by midnight, Neptune a few hours earlier. Venus (gibbous) moves into the dusk sky during the latter half of December.

Pluto is too close to the sun to observe this month.