This is Ephemeris for Wednesday, May 7th. Today the Sun will be up for 14 hours and 31 minutes, setting at 8:55, and it will rise tomorrow at 6:22. The Moon, 3 days past first quarter, will set at 4:36 tomorrow morning.
Let’s take our weekly look at the whereabouts of the naked-eye planets. At 10 PM this evening two of the five naked eye planets will be out. Jupiter, is now the brightest evening planet, our substitute evening star if you will. It will be in the low in the west-northwestern sky. The rapidly fading Mars, with its distinctive reddish hue, is in the west-southwest, moving away from the stars Castor and Pollux in Gemini to the lower right of it. By 5:30 AM Venus will be seen very low in the east, as the Morning Star. It will require a low eastern horizon. It should be visible until a bit after 6:30. Saturn is visible close and to its right and a bit above. It will disappear much sooner than Venus.
The astronomical event times given in this blog are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan (Lat 44.7° N, Long 85.7° W; EDT, UT – 4 hours) unless stated otherwise. Times will be different for other locations.
Addendum
The evening planets Jupiter and Mars seen with the fading stars of winter at 10 PM, on May 7th, 2025. Created using Stellarium and GIMP.
The Moon tonight, May 7, 2025. A view visible in small telescopes showing an image with and without selected features labeled. Created using Stellarium, LibreOffice Draw, and GIMP.
Venus and Saturn at 5:30 AM tomorrow morning, May 8th, 2025, low in the east. Saturn may still be tough to spot at our northerly latitude (45 N). Created using Stellarium.
Telescopic Jupiter, Venus and Saturn (north up) as they would be seen in a small telescope with the same magnification. Jupiter is shown for tonight, 10 PM, May 7, 2025. Its apparent diameter is 33.3″. Mars is 6.3″ in diameter, too small to be shown here. My lower size limit is 10″. Venus is shown in the morning of May 8th. Its apparent diameter is 37.9″, and is 34.6% iluminated. Saturn is 16.3″ in diameter, but its rings, being nearly edge on may not be visible. They are 2.3 degrees from being edge on and barely illuminated, They were edge on to the Sun two days ago. Planetary surface detail is more subtle than shown here. The ” means seconds of arc, or 1/3600th of a degree. Created using Cartes du Ciel (Sky Charts).
The naked-eye planets and the Moon at sunset and sunrise on a single night, starting with sunset on the right on May 7, 2025. The night ends on the left with sunrise on the 8th. Click or tap on the image to enlarge it. Created using my LookingUp app and GIMP.
This is a low precision ephemeris of the Sun Moon and naked eye planet positions for today and tomorrow, May 7th and May 8th, 2025. Some of the columns are self-explanatory, others are not. The transit column is the time that the body crosses the meridian and is due south. Elong, for elongation, is the angle between the Sun and that body. RA is right ascension, which is the object’s east-west position on the celestial sphere in hours and minutes. Dec is declination which is the north-south position of the object on the celestial sphere in degrees and minutes. R is the distance of that object from the Sun in astronomical units. An astronomical unit is about 93 million miles or 150 million kilometers. And Delta is the distance of that object from the Earth, also in astronomical units. I omit the ‘m’ in am and pm for compactness. The data was generated using my LookingUp for DOS app and displayed as a table by my Ephemeris Helper app.
Bob Moler's Ephemeris Blog 
