How to find planets in the night sky
Hello, this is Rick and the other day our writer had an accident and wasn’t able to complete this story the way it was planned so I’ll be doing the writing today… for better or worse 
Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, Venus and Mercury are all very easy to spot with the naked eye -IF you know where to find them. Using a little know-how and maybe the use of some tools found on the web you can walk outside and point right at these planets. It’s quite easy.
Mercury is very close to the Sun and if you are lucky and have a good view of the Sun setting you may see it glowing right near where the sun set. Mercury only has an 88 day year and most of that time it difficult to be seen by us on Earth.
Venus is the simplest one to find. For an hour or two around when the sun sets for the night you can usually see Venus low in the sky. It’s the brightest object visible and if you squint you can make out the shape of it even without a telescope. If you’re in the Northern Hemisphere it will probably be somewhere between where the Sun set and toward the South. It is, of course, not always there because it rotates around the Sun just like the Earth but at a different speed so we don’t always line up so sometimes it is blocked by the Sun or sets before it.
The next easiest for me to find is Mars, if it’s around… Mars is usually fairly bright and although it’s called “The Red Planet” it really is closer to being light orange or even pinkish. Once again, with the naked eye you can see that it is not a star and has a shape. Finding it is another issue altogether because of it’s orbit it can be in many different places. This September it will be near the
As we get further out in space it get’s a little trickier to find our local planet friends. Without a proper guide of some kind you could search for quite some time to find Jupiter and Saturn. The easy part is they are still two of the brighter objects in the sky. Also, looking near the Sun’s general track is a good place to start.
You can usually notice that Jupiter and Saturn are not regular stars. Stars look like little tiny points of light and planets looks like little dots. You can even see that Saturn looks like it isn’t round, which it is of course but the rings around the planet make it appear oblong until you look at it with a telescope.
Through a telescope these planets are amazing! You can see different features on the surface of Mars, Saturn’s rings are easily recognizable and Jupiter not only shows you it’s different band of color but you can easily see 4 or 5 of it’s moons in orbit around it.
I would suggest listening to a public radio station’s news broadcast which usually contains a short story about where and when which planets will be visible every day. Another option is to go to http://currentsky.com/planetwatch.html which is an excellent source with pictures. You can also visit http://www.space.com/spacewatch/sky_calendar.html, a site that gives detailed descriptions of monthly astronomical happenings. If you are feeling a little more advanced and adventurous go to http://www.heavens-above.com/ where you can enter your location and it will not only track the planets for you but the International Space Station, asteroids, comets, and other objects in the night sky.
