The Sky This Week - Thursday October 25 to Thursday November 1

The Last Quarter Moon is Thursday, November 1.  Four bright unaided eye planets are seen in the early evening sky. Mercury climbs higher and is close to Jupiter all this week. Saturn and Mars are visible in the evening skies.

The Last Quarter Moon is Thursday, November 1. The Moon is at perigee, when it is closest to Earth, on the 1st.

Evening twilight sky on Saturday, October 27 looking west as seen from Adelaide at 20:39 ACDST (60 minutes after sunset). Mercury and  Jupiter are close together above the horizon.

Similar views will be seen elsewhere in Australia at the equivalent local time (60 minutes after sunset)

Evening sky on Saturday, October 27 as seen looking northwest from Adelaide at 21:12 ACDST (90 minutes after sunset). All  4 bright planets are clearly visible.

Similar views will be seen throughout Australia at the equivalent local time (90 minutes after sunset, click to embiggen).







 Venus is lost to view and will return to the morning skies later in November.

Mercury climbs higher in the evening skies and is close to Jupiter form the 27th to the 1st of November.

Jupiter  is in the early evening sky above the western horizon just above Mercury. It is setting around 30 minutes after astronomical twilight when the sky is fully dark.

Mars is in Capricornius and is readily seen in the evening. Mars is now rapidly dimming and shrinking. In a telescope you can see a few features as the huge dust storm has abated, the polar cap is obvious in even small telescopes.

Saturn is in the north-western evening sky in the early evening and is a good telescopic object in the early-evening sky, setting around mif=dnight. It is still within binocular range of the Trifid and Lagoon nebulae but is slowly moving towards the globular cluster M22.

Printable PDF maps of the Eastern sky at 10 pm AEST, Western sky at 10 pm AEST. For further details and more information on what's up in the sky, see Southern Skywatch.

Cloud cover predictions can be found at SkippySky.

Here is the near-real time satellite view of the clouds (day and night) http://satview.bom.gov.au/