Look at Uranus! The ice giant is ready to make a RELEASED appearance as it hangs between the moon and Mars
- The ice giant has a rare appearance after sunset on January 20th
- To see Uranus, find Mars, then scan slowly toward the crescent
- You may need binoculars, but they should appear as a faint blue disc
- Mercury is visible in the second week of January, according to NASA
Uranus will be in plain sight for the world to see tonight.
NASA says the ice giant will be visible on January 20 a few hours after sunset.
The seventh planet from the Sun shines at the edge of visibility with the naked eye, especially in areas with light pollution, so it is notoriously difficult to see.
But telescope or binocular stars should be able to see it hanging in the night sky between the moon and Mars.
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Uranus will be visible from Earth as a faint bluish disk between the Moon and Mars after the sunset of January 2020
“That evening, find the crescent and the Red Planet in a few hours after dark,” advises NASA’s Sky Up observation guide.
Mars will stand out in the night sky with an orange, reddish hue next to the moon, says Axel Diaz, solar system ambassador for NASA.
“People say you can’t find the planet Uranus – it’s very hard to find, it’s very weak, it’s very small,” says Diaz.
‘The best way to find it is to look at the moon. Look at the moon and look at Mars.
Wednesday also sees a first quarter of the moon that was already well above the horizon at sunset.
On the northern hemisphere of the Moon, craters such as Aristotle, Atlas and Hercules should be easy to choose.
And tonight, Pisces will be visible near the border it shares with the constellations Cetus and Aries.
About 1.82 billion miles away from us, Uranus has so far been visited by a single spacecraft on Earth, NASA’s Voyager 2, in 1986.
It may not be so bad: a 2018 Oxford University report confirmed that hydrogen sulfide gas orbiting its upper atmosphere gives Uranus a stinking rotten egg odor.
“If an unhappy man ever descended through the clouds of Uranus, he would have encountered very unpleasant and odious conditions,” warned astronomer Patrick Irwin.
What’s worse, NASA says the magnetic bubble surrounding Uranus is directing its harmful atmosphere into space.
The atmospheric loss is due to the planet’s twisted magnetic field, which causes the magnetosphere to sway “like a poorly thrown football,” the agency said in a statement last spring.
This causes parts of Uranus’ atmosphere to flow into plasma-laden bubbles, called plasmoids, which move away from the magnetic field as it is moved by the Sun.
Scientists have determined that the plasmoid around Uranus measures approximately 127,000 miles by 250,000 miles and has removed between 15 and 55% of Uranus’ atmosphere from the planet.
The seventh planet from the Sun shines at the edge of visibility with the naked eye, especially in areas with light pollution, so it is notoriously difficult to see. But stars with telescopes or binoculars should be able to see it hanging in the night sky between the moon and Mars.
For a little less different from astronomy, NASA also indicated that Mercury will be in sight in the last two weeks of January.
Mercury has very little atmosphere and would not smell too much.
You will need an unobstructed view to the west to see the planet, as it will appear just a few degrees above the horizon after sunset, starting in the middle of the month.
“This small planet orbits much closer to the Sun than to Earth, which means it also orbits the Sun much faster, completing its ‘year’ in about a quarter of the time it takes the Earth to return once,” according to the agency.
“That’s why we have a chance to see Mercury in the sky every three months or so, because it seems to throw back and forth from one side of the Sun to the other.”