Look eastward after darkness falls, and you'll see a gleaming beacon that outshines everything else in its vicinity. That's Jupiter! On July 9th, the king of planets reached opposition, the point in the sky opposite the Sun — it rose as the Sun set. Each night afterward it's been inching a little higher in the evening sky as darkness falls.

No matter how you look at it, Jupiter is so bright and easy to spot that it makes an inviting telescopic target. What makes Jupiter such a treat is that it offers more to see in a telescope than does any other planet. It's the only one that shows distinct features in almost any telescope. And it's got four large moons that hover nearby like bright fireflies.

Before tracking down Jupiter with your telescope, grab your binoculars and find a tree or wall to brace against while pointing them toward Jupiter. If your binoculars magnify at least seven times (they'll be marked "7×35" or "7×50," for example), you'll see Jupiter as a tiny white disk. Look closely to either side for a line of tiny stars. Each of those tiny blips is a Jovian satellite at least as big as our own Moon; they only look tiny and faint because they're more than 1,500 times farther away.

Put a low-power eyepiece (the one with the highest number engraved on its barrel) in your telescope, then maneuver the tube so that Jupiter is centered in the eyepiece.

You might see two, three, or four moons, depending on when you look. The count often changes from night to night (or, if you're patient, even from hour to hour). That's because while orbiting Jupiter they sometimes glide in front of the planet, behind it, or into its shadow. These hide-and-seek movements confounded Galileo Galilei when he first spied these "stars" in 1610. But he soon realized they were actually circling around Jupiter, forming a miniature solar system of sorts.

The moons are named Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto — or, collectively, the Galilean satellites — and it's difficult to tell which one is which. Callisto is usually (but not always) farthest from Jupiter, and Ganymede is a little brighter than its siblings. Fortunately, help is just a few mouse clicks away, using our online guide to identifying them.

Now turn your attention to Jupiter itself, and two things should be noticeable. First, the disk may not look perfectly round. Jupiter is a "gas giant" — it consists almost entirely of hydrogen and helium, and the "surface" you see is actually the top of a thick cloud layer floating high in an atmosphere thousands of miles deep. Jupiter spins so rapidly, rotating completely in less than 10 hours, that its equatorial midsection bulges out a bit.

Second, you should be able to see that the planet has two tawny-colored stripes running parallel to the row of moons. These darkish cloud bands in the Jovian atmosphere are called belts, and the brighter ones are zones. The North and South Equatorial Belts straddle the bright Equatorial Zone like a cream-filled cookie sandwich. If your telescope's main mirror (or lens) is at least 6 inches, you might be able to pick out a few other belts and zones closer to Jupiter's poles.

The most famous cloud feature on Jupiter is the Great Red Spot, an enormous oval-shaped storm about twice the size of Earth. Astronomers have known about the Red Spot for at least 150 years, but there's still no agreement as to which chemical compounds create its distinctive color.

Be forewarned that seeing the Great Red Spot is a challenge to spot in a small telescope. Your best prospects will be when the spot is nearest the middle of Jupiter's disk, which is a snap to figure out thanks to our handy Javascript utility. The planet's rapid rotation means that these "windows of opportunity" last only about an hour, so be prepared to look for it over several consecutive nights. Also, don't expect to see a bright red blob. The spot's color is subtle — much closer to pale orange than crimson.

If I've whetted your appetite and you want to really delve into what Jupiter's disk has to offer, check out John McAnally's excellent guide to observing the planet.

Jupiter’s cloudtop “surface” is a lively place that has kept telescopic observers busy for centuries. The planet’s dark belts and light-hued zones change their appearance and sprout new features frequently. In the past, keen-eyed Jupiter observers eyeballed the comings and goings of new features, but these days much of the monitoring is done with high-quality CCD images obtained by amateur astronomers.

One newly discovered feature is the little red spot (LRS), which was first identified by John Rogers, British Astronomical Association’s Jupiter Section director. As Rogers recounts, “This spot appeared last winter while Jupiter was hidden behind the Sun. I noticed it on March 1st in images taken by amateur astronomers Tomio Akutsu in the Philippines and Anthony Wesley in Australia. Such spots in the South Tropical Zone (STrZ) are very rare.”

Since LRS’s discovery, the currents of the STrZ have carried it inexorably toward the Great Red Spot. Jupiter watchers wondered what would happen to the small spot when it encountered the GRS and the adjacent Oval BA (Red Spot Junior). The moment of fate arrived on July 3rd, when the LRS tried to squeeze through the narrow gap between the GRS and adjacent Oval BA like dough through the rollers of a pasta machine.

As of this date, the little spot’s ultimate fate remains unclear. The July 5th image by Japanese amateur Isao Miyazaki (seen here) and those by Wesley and others offer tantalizing hints that some material from the spot may have survived, perhaps destined to re-form on the other side of the GRS. One thing is certain — the nights ahead will be interesting ones for Jupiter observers!

Atmospheric features like the LRS provide scientists with valuable clues about the dynamics and composition of the Jovian atmosphere. Camille Carlisle’s May 28th report neatly summarizes some of the scientific interpretations.

Currently Jupiter is situated in eastern Sagittarius and visible all night long. The giant planet reaches opposition on July 9th. Under steady viewing conditions, a 4- to 6-inch telescope will show Jupiter’s Great Red Spot quite well, though larger instruments will likely be needed to detect whatever might remain of the LRS. Look on the following edge of the GRS, which is currently near Jovian System II longitude 121°. (Transit times for the GRS are given in the July issue of Sky & Telescope, page 66, and also here.)

A week after perihelion, Comet C/2007 W1 Boattini should now be visible in the dawn sky by observers in the Northern Hemisphere. Preliminary results on Seiichi Yoshida's website indicate that it's now roughly magnitude 5.5 — still near its peak brightness.

On July 4th, Comet Boattini is just 6° above the eastern horizon 90 minutes before sunrise at latitude 40° north. That's too low for easy viewing, and the sky is already beginning to get bright even then. But the comet appears roughly 2° higher on each succeeding morning, and the Moon doesn't start to interfere until July 16th. Meanwhile, the comet is likely to fade as shown on Yoshida's website, becoming a faint telescopic target by August.

So early July is the best time for northerners to see this comet — assuming that your're fanatical enough to get up at 3 or 4 a.m. Few people are likely to see the comet without optical aid, but it should be pretty easy to spot through binoculars as long as your light pollution isn't too bad. Click here to download a detailed chart. We eagerly await our first post-perihelion reader reports.

If you can find a spot with a completely unobstructed western horizon, you can watch an extraordinary sky show in August and September 2008. Every evening just after sunset, four planets and two first-magnitude stars combine to form fascinating and ever-changing patterns.

If you live in the Southern Hemisphere, you can watch the whole show with your unaided eyes, but you will need binoculars to appreciate it properly from mid-northern latitudes. Go outside ten minutes after sunset and scan the western horizon until you find brilliant Venus, shining at magnitude -3.8. Then look for the fainter planets.

Mercury (magnitude -0.5 to 0.5) joins Venus from mid-August through mid-September. Saturn (magnitude 0.8) is low at the beginning of August and disappears a couple of weeks later. Mars, the faintest by far at magnitude 1.7, starts August high to the left of Venus and ends September to Venus's lower right. Look also for Regulus and Spica, which are brighter than Mars but fainter than Saturn. And for the first three evenings of each month, a thin crescent Moon joins the show.

Click here to view a one-megabyte movie of the four-planet dance. After watching the general progression, step forward and back to see the configuration on any particular evening. You may need to install QuickTime to watch the film if you haven't already done so.

(Last updated June 6th.)

Serious comet chasers — people who track faint comets with telescopes and binoculars — have been aware of Comet C/2007 W1 (Boattini) for quite a while. It was forecast to become quite bright for a telescopic comet, 6th or perhaps even 5th magnitude, making it visible without optical aid to skilled observers at dark sites.

For a while, Boattini exceeded its brightness predictions by more than a magnitude. Now it has settled back to its predicted behavior. If it bumps up again — and that's a very big if! — it could become fairly prominent low in the east before dawn in July.

Right now (June 6th) the comet is deep in the southern sky and nearing the Sun, so it's visible only from the Southern Hemisphere. There, people have been seeing it without optical aid under ideal conditions. In late May Boattini was also spotted by many binocular observers in the southern tier of the United States.

As of early June the comet is crossing southern Canis Major. If you're at the latitudes of Australia and New Zealand, start looking for it in late twilight, and continue until the Sun's afterglow has completely disappeared. Click here for a detailed, full-page, printable chart showing the comet's path south of Sirius.

The comet passes directly south of the Sun in mid-June, making it invisible to anybody north of Antarctica.

Boattini will emerge from the Sun's glow around the beginning of July as an early-morning object, low in the east, for observers in both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. What it will look like then is anybody's guess. Most likely, it will be a pleasant though unspectacular little binocular target. There's a small but significant chance that it will become brighter than any comet since Holmes's spectacular outburst late last year.

And there's an even smaller chance that the comet will disintegrate entirely while it's hidden in the Sun's glow and never be seen again. It wouldn't be the first time that's happened to a comet.

Here's a light curve and chart of its future path. Stay tuned to SkyandTelescope.com, and we'll keep you posted on the developments.

Mars is one of the half dozen swiftest-moving objects in the sky — not counting the occasional near-Earth asteroid or comet. Except when it’s closest to Earth, Mars moves through the stars at roughly 1.4′ per hour, or ½° per day. So it’s possible — though challenging — to track the planet’s progress from one night to the next with your unaided eyes.

But if you want to see Mars move during a single observing session, you’ll need a telescope, or at the very least binoculars.

A planet’s motion is easiest to see when there’s a bright star very nearby to provide a frame of reference. Stargazers in far-western Europe and Africa and the easternmost sections of the Americas had such an opportunity on the night of May 19–20, when Mars passed just north of the 5.3-magnitude Eta Cancri. The planet was less than 3′ from the star from 8:00 to 9:30 p.m. EDT on May 19th (0:00 to 1:30 May 20th Universal Time).

Circumstances are even better three nights later, when Mars plunges into Messier 44, the Beehive — a whole cluster of stars! A particularly close encounter is viewable low in the sky from America’s West Coast around 11:30 p.m. PDT on May 22nd, with Mars less than 1′ south of 6.4-magnitude 39 Cancri. A half hour later, the planet is directly between this star and its nearby 6.6-magnitude companion. Click here for a full-page, printable chart showing Mars's track through the Beehive.

Western Europe and Africa and the easternmost Americas are again favored for the closest approach of all, at 9:00 p.m. EDT on May 23rd (1:00 UT May 24th). That’s when you’ll find the planet’s center about 16″ — just 3 Mars diameters — north of a 6.9-magnitude star. If you look carefully, you should be able to track the planet’s motion almost continuously as it traverses 1.4″ every minute — moving its own diameter every 3½ minutes.

But wherever you’re viewing from, even if you miss these spectacularly close conjunctions, Mars’s passage through the Beehive will be an event you’ll never forget.

Did you get to see the crescent Moon occult the Pleiades last Tuesday night? Conditions here in Boston were pretty iffy, but things worked out alright in the end.

Both the National Weather Service and the Clear Sky Chart had good forecasts, so I felt confident scheduling a little observing party in our local park with my family and a couple of friends. But thick clouds began to cover the sky at sunset, and prospects were looking grim. Fortunately, the clouds thinned out, leaving just a medium-heavy haze by the time the Moon neared the Pleiades.

Because of the haze, the cluster was completely invisible to the unaided eye, and I could see only the brightest stars through my 10×30 binoculars. But my 15×70 binoculars, 70-mm refractor, and 7-inch Dob all had enough power to show dozens of stars, so three people got to watch each occultation simultaneously. Every disappearance was greeted with little cries of delight. Overall, the 15×70 binoculars probably provided the most aesthetically satisfactory view.

Saturn and Mizar provided icing on the cake, particularly for one friend who had never seen Saturn before. Which all goes to show that even haze and heavy light pollution don't have to stop you from having a great observing experience.

If you have any stories of your own, please submit them as comments below.

The first time I knowingly saw the zodiacal light, it was so bright that I couldn't believe I'd never seen it before. I was in Chile, across the valley from the professional observatories at Cerro Pachon and Cerro Tololo. I commented to my host, the superb astrophotographer Daniel Verschatse, that the light pollution from nearby La Serena was unbelievably intense. The light in the west was washing out even the Sagittarius Milky Way, which was quite high in the sky at the time.

"Look again," said Verschatse. "That's not light pollution; it's the zodiacal light! See its tall, triangular shape? See how it leans to the right, following the ecliptic?" (In the north, the evening zodiacal light leans left, as shown at right.)

Now that I know what to look for, I see the zodiacal light quite often. I've even seen it — just barely — from my astronomy club's observing field in the outer Boston suburbs. But it's much more prominent if you're far from any artificial light pollution. It's well worth the trip.

The zodiacal light is brightest and broadest near the Sun. But the very brightest part of all can never be seen from Earth, because it's overwhelmed by the Sun's glare. So your best opportunities come right before the onset of morning twilight and after the end of evening twilight, when you can see the sky quite close to the Sun, but the Sun's light is blocked by our own planet.

And since the zodiacal light follows the ecliptic, it's easiest to see when the ecliptic runs highest in the sky near twilight, as shown at right. In the Northern Hemisphere, that happens during the evening from mid-February through mid-April, and in the morning from mid-August through mid-October. (The situation is reversed in the Southern Hemisphere, which is why I could see the zodiacal light so easily on an October evening in Chile.)

Most people prefer to view in the evening, so late winter and early spring are the ideal time. Find spot as far as possible from any artificial lights that has a low western horizon. Go there shortly after sunset on a moonless evening and watch for the zodiacal light to appear as twilight fades.

What are you seeing? The zodiacal light is the combined glow of countless tiny particles (debris from comets and asteroid collisions) that orbit the Sun. Like the dust in an unswept room, their mass is minuscule but their combined surface area is quite large, so they reflect a lot of sunlight. In fact, if it could be condensed into a single point, the zodiacal light would handily outshine all the planets, including even Venus.

As an interesting side note, Brian May, founding member of the rock group Queen, completed his doctoral dissertation on the zodiacal light in 2007, obtaining a PhD in astrophysics from Imperial College in London. He had started the thesis in 1970, but took a 35-year break to become a rock celebrity.

Have you seen the zodiacal light? Then share your impressions below with the rest of our readers.

Did you know that Venus is still visible in the morning sky? I have it on the best authority. There's a chart showing planet visibility in the middle of every issue of Sky & Telescope, and the one on page 47 of the April issue says that Venus is visible just before dawn through April 12th.

But wait a second! Things can't be as simple as that. Venus barely changes from day to day, so it can't just sit there in plain view on the 12th and disappear completely on the 13th. The transition must be subtle.

Moreover, any planet's visibility depends on your latitude, the clarity of the air, your level of experience, and the equipment that you use. Just what does this chart mean when it says Venus is visible?

As author of the chart, I can answer those questions. First of all, we're talking about visibility to the unaided eye. With a telescope, you can see all the bright planets just about any time they're above the horizon when the sky is clear — even during broad daylight.

And unless otherwise stated, all articles and diagrams in our magazine are intended to be precisely accurate for the "S&T standard location: 40° N, 90° W, 55 miles southwest of the proverbial Peoria, Illinois.

Finally, I know perfectly well that visibility isn't an either/or situation, but I have to put down some date. I have a formula based on a planet's brightness and its altitude above the horizon at the beginning or end of civil twilight that predicts when it should be visible to an experienced observer with good-to-excellent conditions. And I'm constantly tweaking this formula based on my own and other people's observations.

That's where you come in. My formula predicts that Venus should be visible very low in the east 15-20 minutes before sunrise through mid-April. Please go out, look for yourself, and report any positive or negative sightings to us. The key to a successful observation is finding a location with a completely unobstructed eastern horizon. And binoculars are extremely helpful, because Venus is bright and bold in binoculars even when it's barely visible to the unaided eye.

The morning of Friday, April 4, is a particularly good oppoprtunity, because Venus will be right next to a thin crescent Moon.

Please submit any reports as comments to this article or e-mail them to observers@SkyandTelescope.com. Include your location, the sky conditions, and the time accurate to one minute.

For instance, I went to my local park (42.1° N, 71.1° W) on the morning of Wednesday, April 2nd. The sky was clear though slightly hazy, with a few wispy clouds to the east. I found Venus in binoculars at 6:03, and it was consistently visible to the unaided eye from 6:05-6:10 — though pretty faint and subtle. I caught my last naked-eye glimpse at 6:20, just before I left, but by that time I was seeing it less than 5% of the time. It was still bright and bold in binoculars, and no doubt would have stayed that way until sunrise.

Incidentally, I was also following Jupiter, far off to the south. It was still quite obvious to the unaided eye at 6:20 — as long as I looked in exactly the right spot. I lost track of Jupiter once and spent several minutes searching for it with binoculars.

And two last questions — which you're also welcome to answer in e-mail or (better) as a comment to this article. Our planet-visibility chart is intentionally optimistic; it says when planets are likely to be visible — even if just for a few minutes — given ideal circumstances. Does this lead to unrealistic expectations? Would you prefer to know only when the planets are likely to be easy to see?

Finally, do you like the format of the planet-visibility chart? Does it tell you everything that you need to know? How would you like to see it changed, if at all?

When I posted that blog about the Sun back on Tuesday, I knew I was jinxing things. Sure enough, Tuesday afternoon was cloudy here. Wednesday brought more lousy weather, and they're calling for rain tonight. So I was shocked when I saw a brief break in the muck over Boston this morning.

Knowing a good sucker hole when I see one, I rushed to my H-alpha solar scope and peered in to see what I had missed since my last observations. Wow! First off, the spots have certainly evolved. But much more impressive than the spots (at least more impressive to me), was the appearance of a dark filament across the Sun's disk. It looked to my eye as if there was a crack on the Sun's surface. A funny idea for sure, but if I didn't know better, I might have been fooled.

My colleague Sean Walker also managed to see the scene from his home in New Hampshire. He stayed home a bit longer than usual this morning to capture the image above. According to his report, I wasn't the only one peering through holes in the clouds.

What do you guys think? Anyone else having as much fun with these spot groups as we are? Share your observations below, and feel free to submit images to the photo gallery.

Oh, and I can't forget to remind everyone to only look at the Sun with a safe solar filter. Us astronomy writers all take a blood oath to include that passage in every solar story we write.

It's so nice to have an active Sun again. Clear skies! (Or at least clearer than mine will be for the next 48 hours.)

P.S. These spots are not the start of the much-awaited next solar cycle. Their magnetic orientation (with south pole leading as the Sun rotates), and their very low latitude, peg them as last gasps of the old Solar Cycle 23. . . even though the first spot of Cycle 24 (at high latitude, with north pole leading) appeared in January. We're still in the minimum-activity period between the old and new solar cycles.

One of the things I like best about working at Sky & Telescope is that nobody thinks twice if you take 10 minutes out of your day to do a little solar observing. I presume the same is true for watching a baseball game while at Sports Illustrated.

Anyway, my office has a beautiful view of the rising Sun in the morning. And as you might expect, perched at my window is my little solar telescope. Its hydrogen-alpha filter allows me to observe the Sun at that specific wavelength. Whenever it's clear, I make sure to take a "morning coffee break" just to see what's up. To be honest, March was pretty boring. But this week has changed all that.

If you have a solar filter or another way to safely view the Sun, be sure to check out the latest group of sunspots that's popped up on the disk. The larger spot is developing and will be fun to keep tabs on over the next few days. And feel free to comment below to let us know what you think of this group.

The world's largest set of opera glasses is operational.

The Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) in Arizona achieved an important milestone in January when both of the telescope's 8.4-meter mirrors pointed toward the spiral galaxy NGC 2770. Last week the LBT folks released the images.

This critical step means we're not far from having another full-time telescopic giant producing incredible observations and scientific discoveries. And it poses the question: Is LBT the largest telescope in the world?

If you ask me, I say no. When the images are combined, the two LBT eyes have the light-collecting area of a single 11.8-meter mirror. And they ride on the same mount and always point in the same direction. But it still takes two separate primary mirrors and two separate optical systems to make the magic happen. The largest binoculars? Sure. The largest telescope? The purist in me still gives the title to the 10-meter Kecks. The 10.4-meter GranTeCan in the Canary Islands isn't quite up and running yet, but it should be soon. When that happens, in my book it will take the crown.

And I don't count Hobby-Eberly Telescope or the Southern African Large Telescope because they can't point all over the sky, and not all of the primary mirror is working at a given time.

So let's start the debate. Do you think the LBT should rank as the "world's largest largest optical telescope"? If you read their press release, that's what they're calling it.

What do you think?

Here in Sky & Telescope country — light-polluted, often-cloudy Massachusetts — the weather turned better than predicted for a change, giving all of us here a crystal-clear view of the lunar eclipse in a clean, starry, ice-cold sky.

I had a visitors at my observatory alternating between views of the slowly progressing eclipse and sights elsewhere using my 12.5-inch reflector under the unnaturally dark full-Moon sky (the Orion Nebula was a chaos of detail, the E and F stars in the Trapezium were easy, so was Rigel B, no sign of Sirius B, markings were still slightly visible on Mars).

The eclipse was a moderately bright one, with the Moon showing pastel orange and red around mid-eclipse. Early Danjon-number estimates that we're getting range from 2.5 to 3.

Roger Sinnott, our lunar-eclipse data master, used the reversed-binocular method to get a preliminary brightness estimate at mid-eclipse: magnitude –3.4. (His final value awaits his calibration of how much the binoculars actually diminish light when reversed, done by comparing stars.) In Brazil, experienced lunar-eclipse observer Willian C. de Souza used the same method and got magnitude –2.4 at mid-eclipse, though with cloud interference. John Bortle got magnitude –3.2.

Images are pouring in to our photo gallery for this event. Post yours too! And did you have any cool observations or experiences to share? Comment below.

Amateur astronomers throughout the Americas and Europe are now planning their photographs, image sequences, or even time-lapse movies of Wednesday night's total lunar eclipse. But don't overlook the scientifically useful projects that are just begging to be carried out. You don't need anything but clear skies and some very simple equipment.

Color

Total lunar eclipses come in a great variety of brightnesses and hues. In February 1860, Irish amateur Mary Ward likened the Moon to "a red-hot penny" in the sky. But the famously dark eclipse of December 1963 was so dim that some skywatchers could not find the Moon when they stepped outdoors near mid-totality!

To help in comparing reports from various observers, even years and cultures apart, French astronomer André Danjon devised a five-point scale that is still used today. To learn how to give this eclipse a Danjon L rating, go here.

Brightness

For 21 years Brazilian astronomer Helio C. Vital has led a very active group of observers in monitoring the brightness of the eclipsed Moon, not only as it moves across the shadow but also from one eclipse to the next. He expects this will be a fairly bright one, which is typical of lunar eclipses taking place when Earth's atmosphere is nearly free of aerosols. "This seems to be a very good assumption, since the most recent volcanic eruption that could have caused some effect (though a very small one) occurred on October 6, 2006, on Mount Rabaul in Papua New Guinea," Vital writes.

"Based on eclipses our group has observed from Brazil since 1986, we predict that the Moon will be shining at total magnitude –2.6 ± 0.4 during mid-eclipse." That's between Jupiter and Venus in brightness.

More about the work of Vital's group can be found (in Portuguese) on their website. For the 2008 eclipse, they list the visual magnitudes of several convenient stars and planets to be used in judging that of the Moon.

So how do you make an estimate? If you wear thick glasses you can try taking them off so the Moon and bright planets or stars look like equal-size blobs. Looking through the wrong end of binoculars also helps.

Size of the Umbra

Timings of celestial events offered early mariners a way to find their longitude far from home. This method was used by Christopher Columbus, who timed the start and end of a lunar eclipse in 1504 during his fourth trip to the New World. When astronomers tried to refine this method, however, they quickly found that the dark center of the Earth's shadow, called the umbra, was larger than pure geometry indicated by about 2%, because our atmospheric sheath adds to Earth's effective diameter.

To time when the Moon's edge enters or leaves the shadow is often iffy. Instead, it's more accurate to time when individual spots and craters cross the shadow's edge. For example, from 697 crater timings sent in by Sky & Telescope readers, I derived an enlargement of 2.1% for the July 1982 eclipse. But for a similar event only six months later, 298 timings gave 1.7% enlargement. In each case the probable error was less than 0.1%. So the enlargement definitely varies slightly from eclipse to eclipse, for reasons not yet understood.

The Moon photo above has prominent features labeled on it, and you can click here for our predictions of their entrance and exit times in the umbra. Before making your timings, set a watch to accurate radio time signals. Write down the time (to the nearest 5 seconds) when the edge of the umbra crosses the center of the crater or other feature. It's as simple as that! (The shadow edge is a little fuzzy, so try to judge the point where light is falling off most rapidly and adopt that for your timings. Use a 2.4-inch or larger scope.)

If you carry out any of these simple projects at Wednesday night's eclipse, please e-mail the results to me. I'm collecting them for later analysis.

But no matter what you do, set aside a little time to sit back and enjoy the eclipse, too!

By now you've probably heard news reports about a super-secret spy satellite, designated USA 193, that will tumble uncontrolled from orbit within the next few weeks. The National Reconnaissance Office, which owns the doomed bird, has been mum on its mission and description.

But in a remarkable press conference on February 14th, a deputy national security adviser announced that President Bush has agreed to let the U.S. Navy try to destroy the satellite prior to its reentry by slamming a ship-fired SM-3 into it.

Apparently, DoD computer models have shown that, if left alone, more than half of USA 193's roughly 5,000-pound mass would survive the atmospheric plunge and reach the ground. In particular, there's a 20-inch diameter tank containing about a half ton of the highly toxic propellant hydrazine. So the decision was made to break up the satellite if possible.

You'll notice that I didn't say "shoot it down," as I've seen in many news reports. USA 193 isn't some aircraft that will simply drop from the sky if hit. Nor will some of the resulting fragments end up in long-lasting orbits that will threaten other spacecraft, as others have speculated.

None of the debris will survive more than a few weeks. That's because while, conceivably, the fragments' orbital apogees (high points) might end up somewhat higher, their perigees (low points) will not — and those perigees are already so low that fairly rapid decay is assured. All else being equal, breaking up the satellite will actually hasten reentry because virtually all the pieces will have higher area/mass ratios that the intact satellite did.

Whether this concern for public safety is genuine, or the NRO spooks don't want souvenir hunters combing through whatever wreckage might land on solid ground, or the Navy wants a good excuse for target practice isn't why I'm telling you all this.

Instead, I want you to go spot this satellite while you still can. The first interceptor missile won't be fired until sometime after February 20th. (There's some evidence that it'll come about 3:30 UT on the 21st, which coincidentally is during totality of that night's lunar eclipse.)
Until then, USA 193 will be left alone — and, as spy satellites go, it's easy to spot if you know where and when to look.

Right now the satellite's altitude is averaging just 163 miles (262 km), and it'll lose another 10% of altitude by the time the shooting starts. Because its orbit is inclined 58½° to the equator, USA 193 passes over virtually every city and town on Earth. If it were to pass directly over you after sunset or before sunrise, it might be as bright as a 1st-magnitude star. That should make it easy to spot with your eyes alone even from a light-polluted urban setting. Even better, right now the satellite is making a series of favorable early-evening passes over North America and Europe.

To determine where and when to look for it, you can get free predictions from our Satellite Tracker. After selecting your location and time zone, you'll be able to create predictions customized for your location. We utilize orbital parameters derived by Canadian satellite sleuth Ted Molczan from amateur sightings. Because the orbit is evolving rapidly, be forewarned that the predicted times might be off by a minute or two.

Good luck! If you succeed in spotting it, add a comment below to let me know how accurate the prediction was for your location.