A (Not So) Swiftly Tilting Planet

Saturn hangs in the western sky throughout the evening, setting a few hours after midnight. The rings are tilted almost ten degrees from edge-on; while that may not seem like much compared to what we’ve seen over the past several years, it’s the biggest tilt we’ll see all year. After this month, the rings will slowly close even farther, though we won’t see them edge on until next year. The shadow of the planet on the rings should be easy to see, too, giving Saturn that amazing three-dimensional look.

Mercury is visible in the evening sky for the first three weeks of May. This is the best view we’ll get this year. By the third week it’s starting to wane and expand into a large, but slim, crescent, after which it will fade as the crescent becomes slimmer and slimmer and Mercury drops toward the sun. For binocular or rich-field scope observers, check out Mercury’s pass just south of the Pleiades on the nights of May 1 and 2.

Mars has retreated (or, rather, Earth has raced ahead of Mars in our faster inner orbit) and now shows a small disk less than six arcseconds across, at roughly first magnitude. That’s so small that it’ll be hard to see much detail on the planet’s face. But it’ll make up for that with a lovely wide-field view on the night of May 22nd, when Mars will drift through the Beehive star cluster (M44 in Cancer).

The moon, too, flirts with the Beehive, passing through it on the night of the 10th. But the five-day-old moon may be too bright to make a good pairing with the fainter cluster. It’s still worth a look! May’s moon also makes close passes with two bright stars, Regulus (on the 12th during the day) and Antares (the night of the 20th). Both passes are occultations somewhere in the world, but, alas, not in San Jose.

Venus is visible in the morning sky, but it becomes harder to find as the month progresses and gibbous Venus retreats to the far side of the sun. With it are Jupiter, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto too, all ensconced in the morning sky and too near the Sun to be good observing targets this month.