November 25-30, 2024: Mars appears with the Beehive star cluster during nighttime hours. The Red Planet is the last entry in the nightly westward planet parade.
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by Jeffrey L. Hunt
Four Bright Planets
The visibilities of the planets are described relative to sunrise and sunset. Find those times in local sources.
Four bright planets – Venus, Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars – are visible during the nighttime hours. The fifth, Mercury, recedes into bright evening twilight. It shines from the southeastern sky during morning twilight later next month.
Venus appears in the southwest after sunset, while Saturn is in the southern sky. Jupiter rises shortly after sunset – approaching opposition next month when it rises at nightfall. Mars rises in the east-northeast about three hours after Jupiter rises and four hours after sundown.
Mars
Mars appears higher and farther westward during the night. By morning twilight, it is high in the south-southwest, near Pollux, one of the Gemini Twins.
The Red Planet marches eastward in front of Cancer, near the Beehive star cluster. Through the end of the month, the planet and star cluster are in the same binocular field of view.
The Beehive is made of a few hundred stars that is nearly 600 light years away, the fifth nearest cluster to the solar system. It is visible to the unassisted eye in a location free from outdoor lighting, appearing about three times larger than the moon.
Like the more famous Pleiades or Seven Sisters cluster that rides on the back of Taurus in celestial artwork, the Beehive or Praesepe is located in a spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy. Such stellar bundles are known as galactic or open clusters.
In comparison globular clusters have different compositions from open clusters and they revolve around the galactic center outside the galaxy’s arms.
Mars is eastward trek seems to be slowly to begin its retrograde on December 6th. After opposition and when it starts eastward, the planet seems to pass along the northern edge of the cluster during early May 2025. Use a binocular to watch Mars motion against Cancer’s stars. Notice its nightly placed compared to the star Eta Cancri (η Cnc on the binocular chart).
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