This Week’s Night Sky: Ghostly Lights, Celestial Triangles

For your viewing pleasure, an optical illusion 550 years in the making.

This means it rises around sunset, climbs highest in the south around 1 a.m. local daylight time, and sets near sunrise.

The magnitude 5.7 planet lies in the southern constellation of Pisces near the very faint, naked-eye magnitude 5 star Zeta Piscium. Both the star and planet should be fairly visible through binoculars, in the same field of view. Uranus will appear as a tiny, blue-green tinged disk.

Appearing much like the faint glow of the Milky Way, this ghostly cone of light rising from the eastern horizon is visible only under dark skies far from light pollution. This ethereal light is caused by sunlight reflecting off countless dust particles scattered between the planets along the plane of the solar system.

The three

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