Event Date: June 26th
Time: 4:00 AM
Brief
It has been over a month since I last showed Uranus and Neptune in the morning sky. Now that the Sun is starting to rise slightly later each morning and at a faster rate, that means that it will be easier to see the distant planets. They are rising about four minutes earlier each evening, and well placed in dark enough skies to see them easily with a telescope. With Uranus, binoculars will do fine for locating it, although using a 'scope helps identify the slowly changing star patterns near it when using a small field (1º or less).
Before elaborating on the fields for each planet, here they are zoomed out. At the time listed above, the Sun is just starting astronomical twilight, so the sky is still dark enough to see both.
Time: 4:00 AM
Brief
It has been over a month since I last showed Uranus and Neptune in the morning sky. Now that the Sun is starting to rise slightly later each morning and at a faster rate, that means that it will be easier to see the distant planets. They are rising about four minutes earlier each evening, and well placed in dark enough skies to see them easily with a telescope. With Uranus, binoculars will do fine for locating it, although using a 'scope helps identify the slowly changing star patterns near it when using a small field (1º or less).
Before elaborating on the fields for each planet, here they are zoomed out. At the time listed above, the Sun is just starting astronomical twilight, so the sky is still dark enough to see both.
Detailed
Now, for the fields: first for Neptune in western Aquarius, followed by Uranus in Cetus near the Pisces border. *Yes, I know that Cetus is not a zodiacal constellation, yet Uranus' orbit "briefly" puts it there! More on that tomorrow.
The fields for both will be 1º, which doesn't help show color of each easily, yet shows enough stars to help recognize some patterns. With their slow movement against the stars, Uranus spends and average of 12 weeks near each [circle] degree of stars, while slower Neptune spends about 6 weeks for each. How did I find these numbers out?? Easy. Uranus takes 84 years to go around the Sun. If converting that to weeks 52.1 weeks per year while adding 21 leap years (84 divide by 4=21, then divide by 7=3), we get about 4,380 weeks. This, divided by 360º in ecliptic longitude, equals a little over 12. Since Neptune take slightly less than twice as long to go around the Sun, that is how I got the 6. Neat???
Anyway, enough of the math. Here are the star fields. Remember the patterns to easily find each. With 1º of field, that is a magnification range of 50-55x with most eye pieces.
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