Check It Out!

I'm very pleased to announce that today's post is all about informing you, the reader, of things that are going on that you, the reader, can see for yourself.

C'mon, let's check it out.

The first little tidbit is that the planets Venus, Mars, and Saturn will all be visible in the same night sky this month. The locations of the planets in the sky, at least for those of us in the northern hemisphere, are described in an article at Space.com, which also describes the planets' movements over the weeks and months ahead until they are no longer visible. This week, though, will provide a particularly nice view of our Sun-orbiting brethren, given a sufficient lack of clouds. If, like me, you have a hard time following the article's description of the planets' locations, there is also a link to a handy image that illustrates the positions of each planet in the western evening sky. For your convenience, I have stolen the image and posted it below.


While I was piddling around at Space.com, I was also reminded that tomorrow is the scheduled test launch of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral. Some of you may remember that I've written about the Falcon 9 in a past post, which can be found here. The Falcon 9 is the vehicle that is slated to take the place of the retiring space shuttle, so this test launch is a pretty big deal. And I must say that I'm very excited about it. Especially since you can get live updates and information about the test launch at SpaceX's website, and what's even cooler is that they will be streaming a live webcast of the launch, which is scheduled to occur at 10:00 am tomorrow (Friday, June 4th). The webcast will go live 20 minutes before launch, at 9:40 am.

Let me repeat that: At 9:40 tomorrow morning, click right here to see a live webcast of the first test launch of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket.