- My astronomy blog, Southern Hemisphere Sky Events

7 October 2018: Four planets and an asteroid visible in the sky tonight

(Posted 7 October 2018) Step outside tonight as the sky darkens to spot four planets without a telescope.

Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn finder chart. Chart prepared for the Gold Coast, Queensland for 8 p.m. AEST / 9 p.m. AEDT for Sunday 7 October 2018. Chart produced using the highly recommended Sky Safari Plus app.

Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn will all be visible to the unaided eye with each looking like a slightly different coloured star.

Image of asteroid (more correctly a ‘minor planet’) Vesta taken by NASA’s Dawn spacecraft. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCAL/MPS/DLR/IDA Image source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4_Vesta#/media/File:Vesta_full_mosaic.jpg

Tonight is unusual from a sky watching point of view, because the asteroid/minor planet Vesta will be relatively close to a bright star in the constellation Sagittarius. This means if you have access to a decent sized pair of binoculars, you will be able to use that star to spot Vesta.

Saturn and Vesta finder chart. Chart prepared for the Gold Coast, Queensland for 8 p.m. AEST / 9 p.m. AEDT for Sunday 7 October 2018. Chart produced using the highly recommended Sky Safari Plus app.

Once you have located Saturn and the ‘Teapot’ of Sagittarius, grab your binoculars and point it at the star that makes up the teapot’s ‘lid’.

Binocular Saturn and Vesta finder chart. Chart prepared for the Gold Coast, Queensland for 8 p.m. AEST / 9 p.m. AEDT for Sunday 7 October 2018. Stars shown to magnitude 9. Chart produced using the highly recommended Sky Safari Plus app.

The asteroid Vesta will be the faint ‘star’ located in the position marked on the finder chart. To confirm you are looking at the correct ‘star’, you can do what professional astronomers do and look again in a few days time. Vesta will be the ‘star’ that has moved relative to the other stars.

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