This is Ephemeris for Wednesday, January 14th. Today the Sun will be up for 9 hours and 10 minutes, setting at 5:27, and it will rise tomorrow at 8:16. The Moon, halfway from last quarter to new, will rise at 6:14 tomorrow morning.
Let’s take our weekly look at the whereabouts of the naked-eye planets. Saturn is the brightest star-like object in the southwestern sky as soon as it gets dark. In a telescope Saturn sports a very thin ring, 1½ degrees from being edge on and is slowly opening. Jupiter is now officially an evening planet, rising before sunset. It’s seen in the evening to the right of Pollux in the pair Castor and Pollux, the bright stars of Gemini. Jupiter’s four brightest moons can be seen even in binoculars, and shift position night to night. Jupiter can still be seen in the morning sky. At 7 AM it will be low in the western sky. Venus, Mercury and Mars are too close to the direction of the Sun to be seen.
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; EST, UT – 5 hours) unless stated otherwise. Times will be different for other locations.
Addendum
This is a photograph of the Sun, Venus and Mars taken through the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory‘s (SOHO) C3 coronagraph last night at 7:54 PM or 0:54 today Universal Time. Venus and Mercury are heading to the left, while Mars is heading to the right. They are all beyond the Sun. Venus will be entering our evening sky, and should be visible in about a month. Mercury too should be visible in the evening twilight by mid-February. Mars will be moving into the morning sky and it will take several months before it will be visible then. Credit: NOAA/ESA.
Jupiter, and Saturn along with the zodiacal constellations, and the path of the Sun (ecliptic) in orange, in this panorama at 8 PM tonight, January 14, 2026. Created using Stellarium.
The Moon three days before last quarter as seen tomorrow morning, January 15, 2026. A view visible in small telescopes showing an image with and without selected features labeled. Created using Stellarium, LibreOffice Draw, and GIMP.
Telescopic Saturn, and Jupiter (north up) as they would be seen in a small telescope with the same magnification at 8 PM tonight, January 14, 2026. Saturn will be 16.7″ in diameter, but its rings, being nearly edge on, may show up brighter than seen here, and extend to 39.0″. They are tilted 1.5° from being edge on. Jupiter will be 46.5″ in diameter. The (”) symbol means seconds of arc, or 1/3600th of a degree. Created using Cartes du Ciel (Sky Charts), LibreOffice Draw and GIMP.
The naked-eye planets and the Moon at sunset and sunrise on a single night, starting with sunset on the right on January 14th, 2026. The night ends on the left with sunrise on the 15th. 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, January 14th and 15th, 2026. 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.
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