The second planet from the sun is presently moving through the constellation Capricorn, setting just after midnight. If you point a telescope at Venus, you will see that the planet’s disk is more than 60% illuminated and resembles a tiny gibbous moon.
On Sunday night, you can use the moon as a helpful guide to finding Saturn. The sixth planet from the sun will be located less than a degree above and slightly to the moon’s right. Look for a bright yellow "star".
While they appear close together in the sky, this is a line-of-sight effect. On Sunday night, the moon will be just under 370,000km from Earth while Saturn, at a distance of 1.4 billion kilometres, is almost four thousand times further away.
Normally, Saturn is one of my favourite objects to view telescopically, thanks to the wonderful ring system surrounding the planet. However, for the past few years, Saturn’s rings have become more challenging to see as the relative motion of Earth and Saturn around the sun means that we are viewing the rings almost edge-on for the next few years.
This week’s accompanying picture, which shows how narrow our view of the rings is, was taken recently from the University of Canterbury’s Mt John Observatory.
Both Saturn and the moon are in the constellation Aquarius. Aquarius is one of the 12 constellations that form the zodiac. It is a sprawling and faint grouping of stars south of the celestial equator. Its name derives from Latin, meaning "water-bearer", and its mythology is steeped in ancient cultures.
It is often associated with the life-giving flow of water. In Greek mythology, Aquarius is linked to Ganymede, a beautiful youth carried to Olympus by Zeus to serve as a cupbearer to the gods.
