Week of June 6-13, 2009 by Dennis Mammana on Creators.com

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Week of June 6-13, 2009

Head outdoors at dawn next week and you will find a wonderful celestial treat: a beautiful string of planetary pearls arching across the heavens.

Very low in the east-northeastern sky lies Mercury. Named for the fleet-footed messenger of Roman mythology, Mercury's 88-day orbit around the sun causes the planet to appear briefly at dawn or dusk about every 1 1/2 months.

If the air is steady, aim a small telescope in its direction. You will see the planet appearing as a tiny disk — not full, but in quarter-phase — created by sunlight shining on the planet from the side.

Far above Mercury is brilliant Venus. Much larger and brighter than Mercury, this is another treat for a small telescope. It also appears in quarter-phase.

To its upper left appears Mars. We often think of the Red Planet as a bright world in our sky — and so it is when only 35 or 40 million miles away. But now, Mars is just about as distant as it ever gets — about 180 million miles from us. It appears 2 1/2 times fainter than Mercury, and more than 100 times fainter than Venus.

This planetary configuration will appear for a few days next week, but on the morning of the June 19, the crescent moon will join the party.

On that morning, the moon will shine just to the upper left of Venus and Mars, creating a beautiful sight.

Aim binoculars at this trio and you'll see quite a 3-D effect, even though depth perception is impossible for such distant objects.

Part of the reason for this stunning illusion is that the moon's "dark" side is easily visible, giving our cosmic neighbor a spherical appearance. The faint glow on the moon's dark side is known as "earthshine". It was Leonardo da Vinci who first explained earthshine is simply sunlight reflecting back to the moon off of planet Earth.

By the morning of June 20, the moon will have drifted midway between Venus and Mercury — not far from the Pleiades star cluster — and by June 21 it will lie just to the left of Mercury. By then Mercury will be so close to the sun it could be quite difficult to spot.

Completing the sky show is Jupiter, now shining brightly high in the southern sky at dawn.

To find out more about Dennis Mammana and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.