Bob Moler's Ephemeris Blog

Friday, May 13th.  Today the sun will be up for 14 hours and 43 minutes, setting at 9:01.   The moon, 3 days past first quarter, will set at 4:09 tomorrow morning.  Tomorrow the sun will rise at 6:16

The planet grouping that’s now breaking up in the morning twilight might be taken as having meaning by astrologers.  To astronomers it’s just a nice line up of planets, that is along our line of sight.  Let’s look at their distances from the earth.  Mercury is actually closest of the four now at 86 million miles,  The rest are farther than the sun.  Venus is next farthest at 139 million miles.  Next comes Mars at 214 million miles away.  Finally there’s Jupiter at 541 million miles out.  So these planets are grouped by accident of their directions from the earth.  They are not really close together.  As far as influence goes, the moon, Jupiter and Venus gave the greatest gravitational effect of the earth, but that’s miniscule compared to the sun.

* Times are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan.  They may be different for your location.

Addendum

Line of sight of the planets in the Planet Jam for May 13th.

Here’s the animation of the morning planets this month.

Planet Jam May 2011 animation