Not many people have seen the planet Mercury. It’s easy to find Venus and Mars and Jupiter and even Saturn, but Mercury’s small and close to the sun and elusive. According to Renaissance gossip (and I do love Renaissance gossip) Copernicus himself never saw Mercury.
However! Now’s your chance! For the next couple of weeks Mercury and Venus will appear unusually close together (they’re actually on opposite sides of the sun, but stargazing is tricksy like that). Because Venus is one of the brightest objects in the night sky you can use it as a marker to help you find Mercury. Just look in the lower western sky about an hour after sunset. The brightest star you see? That will be Venus. Look down and to the right for Mercury. Have a pair of binoculars or a small telescope? Even better. They’ll appear closest together on April 3rd and 4th, and the conjunction will continue through about April 10th.
Why bother? Well, Mercury, the planet of communication, is going into retrograde again around the middle of April. Communication snafus, here we come. So at least this time we can look Mercury straight in the eye and say, “Not with my queries/submissions/revisions, you don’t.”
The Second Duchess
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