The planet Mars has been steadily orbiting eastward and is currently moving past the open star cluster the Pleiades. On Wednesday evening March 3rd Mars will be at its closest to the Pleiades coming within about 3-4o from the open star cluster as it passes by.
Use binoculars or a low-power telescope eyepiece to view Mars and the Pleiades.
Click here to go to the Qué tal in the Current Skies web site for monthly observing information, or here to return to bobs-spaces.
Saturday February 20th the 9-day old waxing gibbous Moon will be crossing the plane of the ecliptic moving north. This is known as the 
Does our Moon actually go around the Earth as many graphics show? From our perspective on the Earth the Moon appears to circle around the Earth. However, in reality, the Moon orbits the Sun together with the Earth*
These four planet-sized moons are visible as small bright stars on either side of Jupiter and depending on the time and date of viewing their arrangement around Jupiter is never the same as this animated graphic, set to 1-Earth day intervals, is showing.
Recreate Galileo’s observations of the Galilean satellites through the use of an online simulation, the Java applet, 
The Juplet will display the planet and the satellite configuration for the date and time on the computer, or you could easily edit the date and time, and after pressing the Enter key see a different configuration. To keep track of these changes the position of each satellite relative to Jupiter could be drawn on a data table similar to Galileo’s data table.