Starwatch: Mars and Saturn align with the moon in the southern sky | Science

This week, the rising moon slips between Saturn and Mars in the low, southern sky. Mars is the brightest and the most red of the two planets. The graph shows the sky at 16:00 BST on 16 October 2018, when the Moon is about halfway between the two visible planets. The Moon will be in the first quarter of phase, when half of the illuminated surface will be visible from the Earth. While Mars and Saturn are the planetary stars of this show, the 16th, the Moon aligns itself most closely with the planet Pluto, located in the sky to the right of the Moon, towards Saturn. But the distant world is invisible to the naked eye, being thousands of times too weak to trigger our retina. Pluto itself is only two-thirds the diameter of the moon, which means that its surface is just larger than that of Russia. The planet Saturn is 9.5 times wider than Earth, but 21 times wider when measured from one side to the other of its annular system. Mars, on the other hand, is just over half the diameter of the Earth.