This January, See A ‘Planet Parade’ In The Night Sky

Astronomer Dean Regas gives us the lowdown on what to look for in the sky this winter, from a “planet parade” to the ATLAS comet.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Flora Lichtman?

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• 1:02Speaker 02

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• 1:29Flora Lichtman?

  This is Science Friday. I'm Flora Lichtman.

• 1:32Ira Flatow?

  And I'm Ira Flatow. January is a great month for looking up. We'll talk to astronomer Dean Regas about the best astronomical events to look out for, with or without a telescope.

• 1:44Speaker 03

  We've got Venus, we got Saturn, we got Neptune, Uranus, Jupiter, and Mars all visible.

• 1:52Ira Flatow?

  I'm asking you to look up, and no, not at the ceiling, but at the night sky, like I did this week, where I saw an awesome display of planets. If you like looking at the night sky, this is a great month to do it. And here to tell us what we can see is a guy who's always found He always has his head in the sky. Dean Regas, astronomer and host of the podcast Looking Up with Dean Regas. Welcome back, Dean.

• 2:17Speaker 03

  Oh, happy to be here.

• 2:18Ira Flatow?

  Now, let's talk about this being a great month. The flashiest event people are really talking about this so-called planet parade. Fill us in.

• 2:26Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. This is some good marketing. Planet parade sounds really great. We're going to have lots of planets up in the sky. We've got Venus. We got Saturn. We got Neptune, Uranus, Jupiter, and Mars all visible. Sounds wonderful, doesn't it? But a little bit bringing people down to earth. Six planets. Sounds good. But four are the ones you can see with the naked eye. But Venus and Saturn are going to be right next to each other in the evening sky right after dark. So Venus incredibly bright, looks suspiciously bright, like a plane or UFO. And Saturn will be faint, but next to it. And then on the other side of the sky, kind of border by the south, southeast is going to be Jupiter and Mars kind of spread out a little bit.

• 3:04Speaker 03

  Uranus and Neptune, you need a telescope to see. You're going to see it on social media with all six of them and the charts and everything. But yeah, I'd say stick with the four planet parade. Sounds pretty good to me.

• 3:15Ira Flatow?

  And I was like you. I thought I was looking at some airplanes and they weren't moving. So is this a rare event for so many of them to be visible at once?

• 3:26Speaker 03

  We're kind of in the cycle where in the winter time, we're getting this a little bit more often. But it's really just all the planets are on their own tracks going around the sun at different speeds. And so they tend to line up along this plane called the ecliptic. This is what kind of the plane of our solar system. So planets like to line up a lot. Seeing all these kind of in one place is pretty cool. And then in case you were wondering where Mercury is, we haven't talked about that. That's going to come around at the end of February and kind of join the parade for a little bit. But that one's always tough to see, too.

• 3:59Ira Flatow?

  And how do you tell whether it's a planet or it's a really bright star?

• 4:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, really good question because some of the planets stand out, like Venus and Jupiter are incredibly bright, brighter than any of the stars. The other ones are a little bit tougher. So Mars is pretty bright right now because we're at closest approach to Mars for the year. And so that just looks like kind of this red, bright star. And Saturn's very faint. So it looks kind of like a, just a normal yellow star out there. But the trick that we always try to tell people is planets twinkle less than stars. So you look for things that aren't twinkling as much. They still will twinkle a little bit. But not as much.

• 4:41Ira Flatow?

  Love it. Yeah, a little more of a disk shaped than a point in in the sky.

• 4:45Speaker 03

  Exactly right.

• 4:47Ira Flatow?

  Yeah, let's move on to another event that's getting a lot of buzz. And I'm talking about the Atlas Comet. What's the deal with this?

• 4:56Speaker 03

  Oh, man, this sounds great. Again, it's this is the brightest comet we've seen in a long time. It's brightness is about as bright as the planet Venus. And so that's hyping up pretty good. Big, big, big problem with this comet is the average person's not going to see it, which you're thinking, well, wait a second. It's bright as Venus. I should see it. Um, it is right next to the sun. So from your view, it's up during the daytime. So you need special observing techniques and equipment to actually see this comet. So is it going to be visible to the naked eye? Highly unlikely. Um, I'm a little worried about people trying to stare at the sun too much. So that

• 5:35Ira Flatow?

  Their binoculars are something really bad idea.

• 5:37Speaker 03

  Yeah. So this comet, I, you know, it's got a lot of hype. It's got another good press agent, but I think this one's one I'm I'm I'm going to pass on looking at, looking for it. Cause it's not going to be easy.

• 5:48Ira Flatow?

  So you're saying it's never going to be visible in the night sky?

• 5:52Speaker 03

  Uh, it it's going to be visible later on. So Southern Hemisphere, it's more visible from that region. Uh, for us in the Northern Hemisphere, it's going to be really tough because it's going to fade probably pretty fast as it moves away from the sun. So we do have a chance, maybe at the end of January to get a glimpse of it. But, uh, when it comes to comets, the rule of thumb is they are fickle beasts and you never know what they're going to do.

• 6:17Ira Flatow?

  I don't recognize the name of this one. It must not come by very often.

• 6:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, this is a one that they astronomers just computed the orbit to be around 160,000 years. So comets live these interesting lives where they're mostly way, way, way out from the sun and they're frozen little ice balls. But when they drift towards the sun, they heat up, create these tails, and that's when you see them. So this comet's going to make a quick skirting of the inner solar system and head back to obscurity for another 160,000 years.

• 6:49Ira Flatow?

  You know, and when we pass through the dust of a comet, we get meteor showers, right? Do we have any meteor showers coming up?

• 6:57Speaker 03

  Well, we got some minor ones in the winter time. The, the next really good one that I've got kind of my eye on is the Lyrids. That's in April, kind of late April, April 21, 22, somewhere around there. That's when we're flying through this comet debris and every year there's creating a lot of shooting stars. So that's the next one I've kind of got my eye on because the moon phase will be favorable. So no moon around, that means more chances of seeing fainter meteors. So Lyrids is the one I got circled.

• 7:29Ira Flatow?

  And, and if you're lucky enough to have a telescope or a nice pair of binoculars, what can you see in the night sky now that would be really cool?

• 7:37Speaker 03

  I, I think the big thing right now that's shining along with the planets are the brightest stars in the year, basically. So the winter sky has the brightest stars, eight of the top 20 brightest stars in the whole sky are visible every night. It's this area of the sky kind of by Orion. So you think of the belt stars Orion, those three stars in a row. There's plenty of other bright stars around it, which some call a circle, some call a hexagon, but I call it the winter football because it's shaped like a football and I got playoffs on my brain. But you got Orion out there with the Orion Nebula, which is an awesome sight to see through a telescope. You got the Seven Sisters, the Pleiades Star Cluster, which make a nice sight.

• 8:21Speaker 03

  There's another one that I, I want to throw out there to challenge the folks called M35. It's this open star cluster in the constellation Gemini. It's not visible to the naked eye, but when you find it with a telescope, it is awesome.

• 8:34Ira Flatow?

  You got to have a clear sky on that one.

• 8:36Speaker 03

  Absolutely. Yeah. The darker the sky, the better. And I hate to say it, the bigger the telescope, the better too.

• 8:43Ira Flatow?

  Have you found that the haze from those terrible forest fires in Los Angeles or other places have been getting in the way of seeing the stars and the planets?

• 8:51Speaker 03

  I think a little bit, especially for folks on the west side of the country, that they are kind of affecting this. And they're also affecting a lot of the communication sites, like the Jet Propulsion Laboratory there in California is having some issues with, they had to evacuate a lot of places. So they were getting a few reports about that. The smoke hasn't drifted extensively yet that we've noticed, at least here in the Midwest.

• 9:17Ira Flatow?

  And what about these thousands of Starlink satellites that SpaceX and others are putting up? Starlink has now 7,000. They're aiming for 12,000. China is competing with them now, and they're trying to orbit up to 15,000 eventually. Are they affecting what people see in the night sky?

• 9:37Speaker 03

  Wow, yeah, talk about a controversial subject. This is something everybody's got kind of an opinion on in the astronomical world. Astronomers, by and large, dislike this because more satellites up in the sky, the more times their telescopes and cameras are going to pick up the satellites when they want to pick up things that are much farther away. It hasn't been a large scale disruption of scientific research yet, but it's definitely on people's minds because thousands and thousands of satellites create thousands of reflective objects, and also could potentially lead to thousands of things falling from the sky. So this competition of, you know, between the countries, there's

• 10:19Speaker 03

  not a lot of collaboration. That's the other problem. So everybody that can send a satellite up can do it.

• 10:25Ira Flatow?

  Right. All right. Let's look a little bit into the future for other big astronomical events that you're excited about. Any lunar solar eclipses coming up this year?

• 10:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, we got two of them in March, which is pretty exciting. The bigger one of the two, I think, is going to be the total lunar eclipse. That's going to be on the night of March 13th into March 14th. So this is when the moon goes into the shadow of the earth and turns that eerie blood red color. This is going to be pretty awesome because it's going to be visible across the entire United States. Almost everywhere will be able to see that total lunar eclipse. So, and this is for people that saw this total solar eclipse back in 2024. This isn't quite the same deal. It's not as mind-blowingly awesome as others. So yeah, this this total lunar eclipse is gonna be kind of a long affair.

• 11:19Speaker 03

  It takes several hours to go through the partial stages and totality. The only problem with totality for this total lunar eclipse in March is gonna be the timing. It'll be 2:26 to 3:31 a.m. Eastern time, but I might as well stay up late for it. It's gonna be cool.

• 11:36Ira Flatow?

  Yeah, yeah. And what's the best way to look at it? To to to you know, you don't need a telescope for this, right? Or binoculars?

• 11:43Speaker 03

  Absolutely not. For a total lunar eclipse, you just wanna kind of sit back and watch the show. It's it's one of those like it's a chill astronomical event because it takes so long. And my advice is when you get to the totality part, you can watch it and then you have some friends and family out there. Get some drinks. Then every time you look back at the moon during totality, it's slightly different. The shade slowly changes and makes a really cool sight.

• 12:12Ira Flatow?

  Dean, you briefly mentioned a partial solar eclipse this year. Let's talk about that.

• 12:16Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. So this is gonna be on March 29th. So we got that total lunar eclipse on the 13th, 14th. And then the partial solar eclipse on the 29th of March. This one's only gonna be visible from the extreme northeastern part of the United States, where just a little bit of the sun will be blocked out by the moon. So no total eclipse for the United States on that one, but still something cool to see if you're in the Northeast.

• 12:40Ira Flatow?

  Yeah, I love I love when that happens and then you have the leaves and you see all those little suns on the ground.

• 12:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. So if you're in, you know, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine, that's the best spots to see it. And even then, it's going only gonna be about halfway eclipse the sun will be. But, you know, again, I'm heading up there to see it. So I can't wait.

• 13:02Ira Flatow?

  Half is better than nothing, right?

• 13:03Speaker 03

  It's oh, man, just the the rush of seeing an eclipse of any kind is really cool.

• 13:09Ira Flatow?

  And so it's going to be a busy year. It looks like, you know, there, there is a total solar eclipse coming up, what, next year? If you want to plan for that?

• 13:17Speaker 03

  Absolutely. I mean, it's on my calendar. By the way, I have eclipses on my calendar through 2079. So I'm good. I'm, I know where I'm going to be, but 2026 is the next total solar eclipse. And for people that saw the one in 2024, you're probably hooked. And the places to see it in 2026 are Iceland and Spain. So take your pick. I'm thinking Spain, but I'm going to start planning very soon.

• 13:47Ira Flatow?

  Well, we'll plan along with you, Dean. Thank you, as always, for being our, our sky guide at the nighttime sky.

• 13:54Speaker 03

  Absolutely. And keep looking up.

• 13:56Ira Flatow?

  Dean Regas, astronomer and host of the podcast, Looking Up with Dean Regas. Dean is based in Cincinnati, Ohio.

• 14:07Flora Lichtman?

  Speaking of looking up, if you get the timing right, you might just be able to catch a glimpse of the International Space Station zooming by above. And if you've ever wanted a peek inside, we have something for you.

• 14:21Speaker 04

  Houston Station on two for the PAO event heads up. We are 20 seconds out from the start of the event.

• 14:27Flora Lichtman?

  We're ready. Earlier this week, Sci-Fry connected young listeners directly with astronauts living on the ISS.

• 14:34Speaker 04

  ACR, this is Mission Control Houston. Please call station for a voice check.

• 14:38Flora Lichtman?

  Astronauts Don Pettit and Butch Wilmore took time out of their astronaut duties to answer questions sent in by students from around the country. And there were some stellar ones that we just had to share.

• 14:51Speaker 05

  Hi, my name is Rochelle, and my question is, what is the most surprising experience you've had while living and working in the International Space Station? And how has it changed your perspective on Earth?

• 15:02Speaker 06

  Wow, Rochelle, that is, that's, that'd be a hard question to answer with a one, only one comment, because every day is different. Such the variety, looking out the window, different sights you see at different parts of the day and night cycle, hands in a micro science gravity work box, doing science there, science throughout the space station. So you really cannot pick a single thing. It's all fascinating.

• 15:25Speaker 07

  Hi, my name is Tyson. My question is, how does it affect your body when you go into space?

• 15:31Speaker 06

  Uh, the body does do very many changes. Uh, they say, uh, you know, and you can kind of feel it a little bit, that your internal organs kind of shift up into your body a little bit, uh, which is good because it makes you feel thinner. Um, also, God, goodness, there's, there's so many, like, also, twenty, twenty-five percent of the food we eat actually turns to gas, unless you're Don Pettit, maybe it's a little more. Good question. And, and I'd, I'd like to, to add that we change the effective level of gravity by a factor of one million. That's what microgravity means. And you change any other environmental factor, say you change temperature by a million, uh,

• 16:14Speaker 06

  you'd be turned into a little, uh, uh, carbon shard, uh, a different kind of CRISPR. Uh, and the fact that human beings could go into space with a factor of one million change in gravity and still basically, uh, continue on, I find is an amazing robustness that we as human beings have.

• 16:37Speaker 07

  Hi, my name is Alegria. My question is, can you describe what the sunrise looks like when you're on the International Space Station?

• 16:48Speaker 06

  Absolutely. When the sun just starts to come up, you get a blue strip across the horizon. And as it continues to get closer and closer to the horizon, you start to see the color, just like a prism breaks down the light, the atmosphere breaks down the, the, the white light into the various colors like a prism. And then it's just before, just as the sun is peeking above the, the horizon, the entire International Space Station turns to an orange color for five or six seconds. It's pretty amazing, wonderful to see.

• 17:21Speaker 06

  And on Earth, because of Earth's rotation and orbit around the Sun, it takes two minutes for the disk of the Sun to slip below the horizon. On space station, because of our orbital velocity, it takes seven and a half seconds. So you can go from full daylight to full darkness in seven and a half seconds.

• 17:47Flora Lichtman?

  If you, like me, just cannot get enough astronaut content, please head to sciencefriday.com/downlink, where you can watch Don Pettit and Butch Wilmore bob around the ISS and hear more from Earthbound astronauts Katie Coleman, Ellen Akoa, and Nicole Stott, who kept that space chat going. Thanks to NASA and all the astronauts for taking time to chat with us. And thanks to Sci-Fry's Sandy Roberts for leading the charge.

• 18:14Ira Flatow?

  Oh, and one thing more before we go. The Sci-Fry Book Club has just pulled its latest book off the shelf. Book Club captain Diana Plasker has the title.

• 18:24Speaker 02

  Thanks, Ira. Maybe your New Year's resolution is to read more books in 2025. Well, we can help with that. This February, the Sci-Fry Book Club is reading "Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas" by Jennifer Raff. You can join our online community of book lovers and enter to win a free book at sciencefriday.com/bookclub.

• 18:50Ira Flatow?

  That's about all the time we have for now. A lot of people helped make this show happen. Emma Gomez. Sandy Roberts. Robin Casmer. Phyllis S. Mears. I'm Ira Flatow. Thanks for listening.