Jan 2 - January Planets ❤️ and More

January 2 January Planets and More by:

Welcome to 2019! Mohamed Laaïfat Photographies‎ sent this image and best wishes from Normandy, France. Thank you, Mohamed, and happy New Year to all! January guide to the bright planets  In January 2019, Mars is the sole bright evening planet. Venus and Jupiter dominate the east before sunup. Mercury fades from view as a morning planet in early January. Saturn becomes visible before sunup near the month's end. Read more; see charts. Dark skies for 2019's Quadrantid meteors 2019's first major meteor shower is the Quadrantid shower. Best time to watch is probably late night January 3 until dawn January 4. Northerly latitudes are favored. No moon this year! Read more. New Horizons sweeps past Ultima Thule Since its historic encounter with Pluto in 2015, New Horizons has been heading outward. It's now made history again by sweeping past the most distant object yet visited by a spacecraft from Earth. Read more. Spacecraft orbits tiny Bennu, breaks record On December 31 - while we celebrated - NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft went into orbit around Bennu, a near-Earth asteroid. The maneuver makes Bennu the smallest object yet to be orbited by a spacecraft. Read more. Artist’s concept of OSIRIS-REx at asteroid Bennu. The craft is scheduled for a sample collection in 2020 and sample return to Earth in 2023. Image via Heather Roper/University of Arizona. Correction: The July 27, 2018 eclipse - shown in Nima Asadzadeh's photo in Sunday's EarthSky News - was a lunar, not a solar, eclipse. Apologies! 🙏

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Watch the moon sweep past 3 planets By the morning of January 3, a thinner waning crescent moon will appear near Jupiter. How can you find Mercury? Notice that the lighted face of the moon is pointing toward it! Use binoculars if you need them.

Earth closest to the sun today We reach Earth's closest point to the sun for 2019 tonight at 11:20 p.m. CST (central U.S.). It'll be the morning of January 3 for Europe and Africa ... later in the day January 3 for the rest of the world (January 3 at 05:20 UTC; translate to your time zone). Cartoon via Sara Zimmerman at Unearthed Comics. Submit your photo to EarthSky here! Did a friend forward EarthSkyNews to you? Click here to get your own subscription!

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