Venus, Jupiter and Mars bright in the spring sky

The evening sky has been beautiful the past few weeks. Venus and Jupiter are the two bright planets slow-dancing together in the western sky after sunset. Venus is the bright one. With a small telescope or a good pair of binoculars, you can see its crescent shape as it is located between Earth and the sun. The same spyglass will reveal three or four of Jupiter’s moons. Meanwhile, in the eastern sky, the very bright planet Mars is rising and climbing up the night sky during the evening. After Venus and Jupiter have set, Mars is high in the southern sky, following Venus, Jupiter and the sun in the ecliptic plain. Mars is easy to distinguish by its red-orange color. Also, Mars is particularly bright this spring because of its close proximity to us. Earth, traveling along its orbit inside that of Mars, overtook the red planet in late January, and so Mars will gradually grow dimmer through the spring. Periodically, an email about Mars being as big as the full moon makes the rounds over the Internet, but the claims made in that email are false.