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CNN Saturday Morning News
Interview With Ed Albin
Aired May 04, 2002 - 07:34 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
MILES O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: The planets are gathering high above us in the western sky this month. I don't know if high above is the correct way to describe it. We'll ask the expert coming up here about that. It's a celestial show star gazers won't see again until September of 2040, right?
ED ALBIN, ASTRONOMER: That's right.
O'BRIEN: Ed Albin is here. He's with Fernbank Science Center here in Atlanta, and he's here to explain what's going on in the sky. Good to see you, Ed.
ALBIN: Hey, good to see you, Miles. We have a really wonderful grouping of planets in the night sky. We have five planets. These are the planets from antiquity.
O'BRIEN: What do you mean by planets from antiquity?
ALBIN: Well, these were the planets that were observed by sky watchers long ago. We don't know who discovered these planets. Mercury all the way out to Saturn. And these planets are quite bright in the evening sky and just as the ancients did, you can go outside -- if you know where to look, you should be able to find all five of these planets.
O'BRIEN: First of all, real quickly: it's very unusual to see Mercury, isn't it?
ALBIN: That is true. This is a very good opportunity to see Mercury. I think if you're outside and you're trying to find these planets, the problem you will have is finding Mercury.
And, what we suggest is tonight or tomorrow night if you go out and look to the west, simply watch where the sun goes down. The sun will set a bit northwest, and the first thing that you're going to see is you're going to see a very bright evening star.
That is the planet Venus. And, in between Venus and the horizon, that's where you're going to find Mercury. If you can get Mercury, then the other planets are...
O'BRIEN: And you'll be able to see Mercury below Venus at the same time. ALBIN: Exactly. At the same time. And, the key is to go outside right after sundown. For us here in the U.S. it would be about 8:20, 8:30. And as soon as that sun goes down, you'll see Venus and high above this you will find the planet Jupiter.
O'BRIEN: All right. Well you brought a little 3-D -- what do you call one of these things?
ALBIN: This is an orie (ph). It's a little model...
O'BRIEN: What do you call it? An orie?
ALBIN: An orie, right. Before the modern projection planetarium was invented, we used to call it a planetarium. Back in the 1800s if you wanted to go to a planetarium show, this is what you would have. And, it's really neat; what we have here is we have the sun, at the center of our solar system, and the nine planets.
And, I just wanted to show that the planets are really not lined up. They look like they're lined up in the night sky. They're sort of clustered together, over in this part of the solar system. And, these are the five planets that we're going to see. Right here is the planet earth, this is where we are.
Now we're not going to be able to see Pluto, Uranus, or Neptune. They're out of the picture right now, but these...
O'BRIEN: You can never see them with the naked eye anyway, right?
ALBIN: No you cannot. Uranus was not discovered until 1781 and you need a telescope to see those three planets, but these other planets, they've been observed for a long time...
O'BRIEN: Hey, quickly, is Pluto a planet? Do you think it's a planet?
ALBIN: There's a lot of debate on that.
O'BRIEN: Do you think it is?
ALBIN: No. I think Pluto is an asteroid. An icy asteroid. There have been about 500 objects found up there with Pluto. Unfortunately Clyde Tombaugh, who discovered Pluto back in 1930, passed away just a few years ago; and he was an advocate of the planet -- of Pluto being a planet. And now that he's passed away, there's been some move to make Pluto an asteroid, but I don't know if that's going to happen.
O'BRIEN: All right. So, My Very Educated Mother Just Ordered Nine Pizzas -- what do you -- just nine?
ALBIN: That's right. We may go down to eight. People ask about 10 planets; we only have eight planets in the solar system.
O'BRIEN: All right, I'm sorry. We have digressed. Let's go back to this now. The earth is here, the sun is there, and this is this grouping here. So, over this course -- in the night sky itself, how wide a swathe of sky is...
ALBIN: We're looking at about 30 -- 30 degrees -- and what that means is that if you go outside, and you look to the west, about from where you see Venus and a little bit below Venus where Mercury is -- about halfway up in the sky you have Venus, then up here is the planet Jupiter -- in between Jupiter and Venus you will find Saturn and Mars.
Tomorrow night is a particularly good night to go out because Saturn and Mars will make a very beautiful chronicle with the planet Venus. So those three are kind of clustered together, down below is Mercury, and up above is the giant planet Jupiter.
O'BRIEN: So it's possible if you have a clear night, and you look in the right place, you could see all of these five planets at once. And, the next time you're going to be able to do that in the same swathe of sky is when?
ALBIN: That's going to be 2040. This happens about every 40 to 60 years, so I would say over the next two weeks that if you don't get out tonight or tomorrow night -- if it's raining or whatever, don't worry about it. In fact, a very good time to go out would be on the 14th because the moon will also be in the picture -- the moon will be very, very close to the planet Venus. Use the moon as a big finger in the sky to find that planet Venus.
O'BRIEN: OK, so, now tell me this: are you getting a ton of calls at the planetarium, now? Do people want to come see it now with a telescope? I imagine it's actually more fun, in a way, to see it with the naked eye, though.
ALBIN: It really is. You don't need a telescope to see these, obviously. Although they look quite spectacular through a telescope, in particular the planet Saturn, you can see the rings of Saturn; you can see the four moons of Jupiter. But, if you don't have a telescope, don't get discouraged because this is an event for the naked eye. Even if you have a telescope, you're not going to see all of these planets in one field of view; they're kind of spread out over a good section of the sky.
O'BRIEN: What about binoculars? Is that a way to do it, or not?
ALBIN: Binoculars are very good. In particular for finding the red planet Mars. Of all the planets, people have been disappointed with the red planet Mars. We hear so much about Mars, the exploration of Mars by NASA. This month, Mars is very far away from the earth. So Mars is, of all those five planets, including Mercury, Mars is the famous member. So I think Mercury is hard to find because it's close to the horizon. Mars is hard to find because it's pretty faint. But still visible to the naked eye.
O'BRIEN: All right. Tell me again the name of this thing? It's an orie.
ALBIN: It's an orie. O'BRIEN: An orie. Thank you for bringing your orie, Ed, because we couldn't get that software to run on the computer that would have explained it, too. But, who needs it? You know, sometimes low-tech is the way to go.
ALBIN: That's right. We're going back to antiquity.
O'BRIEN: 18th century technology. All right, thanks for coming in.
He's with Fernbank Science Center here in Atlanta. I'm sure if you have any questions, feel free to give him a call. We'll give his home number out later. Just kidding. Anyway, thanks for coming in. We appreciate it.
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