Parade of planets, part two

 

Welcome to part two of our parade of planets.  It's April 3, 2022.

This is the photo with which I ended part one.  Notice here that you can see the redness of Mars, the upper planet.  

Saturn is going to continue to move upwards in relation to Mars however and will soon lead the parade.  Let's watch what happens. 

It's April 5, 2022 today. April 4th was 'clouded out.'  

Saturn has moved up significantly. 

I wish I could have shown you the moment of conjunction of these two, but thank goodness the clouds relented to the degree they did and I am able to show you this. (I had been watching for sometime, earlier this morning, and gnashing my teeth at the weather)  

I would have liked to show them to you side by side, but really, they were probably not high enough in the sky for me to see them when they actually passed one another. Clouds or no clouds, the moment of conjunction probably happened below my horizon.

Saturn is now above Mars in the sky. 

A short time later on the 5th

It's really hard to see Mars and Saturn in this sky. Let me zoom in a bit...

There they are. Beautiful, aren't they?  And remember, that's Venus down below, not the moon. 

April 8, 2022

They are moving apart. 

Back in part one, I showed you the moon joining the marching planets briefly in the very early morning. It's no longer rising early in the morning. This view was taken in the evening of April 9, about 9 p.m. 

The humidity was down to around 58% and I got this picture. 

The next morning, about 5:30 a.m., (April 10) I took the shot you see below.  Notice that Jupiter has now, finally, joined the parade.  It's peeking through the palm fronds.  You can see that dawn is coming soon. That's why we haven't been able to see it before. It was hidden in the dawn.  

This picture is a close-up of the upper portion of the previous photo. Note that Mars, the lower of the two smaller appearing planets, shows some color, proving its identity.  Saturn is now well above it.  

I tried to get close-ups of both these planets but wasn't able to.  

(And, as Dianne mentioned in a comment she made about part 1, some stars will occasionally appear in these pictures.)  

This picture was taken about 10 minutes after the last one.  The dawn is coming faster now and you can just barely see Jupiter down low, between the fronds. 

April 11, 2022, about 5:45 a.m. 

They're almost in a straight line now.  What a parade!  

April 14, 2022. 

You can see that Saturn has moved farther from Mars since the 11th, and Jupiter is moving closer to Venus. 

I'm excited.  A Jupiter-Venus conjunction is coming.  Cross your fingers that we can see it.  

Part three continues shortly.  Keep watching.     -djf