Sunday morning February 28th the innermost planet, Mercury, and two of the ringed outer planets, Jupiter and Saturn, will be in a triple conjunction as Mercury moves eastward past Saturn and then Jupiter. Mercury will be about 3-4o from Saturn and about 2-3o from Jupiter.
All three will almost fit within the field of view of binoculars and should make for an interesting contrast in apparent magnitudes however Jupiter (-1.97) far outshines Mercury (0.30) and Saturn (0.71).
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.
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.
I’m not exactly sure why this particular date is used but by international agreement astronomers have selected April 11th, 1955 as 0 degrees for year 1 of this Martian calendar. What this works out to is that on Saturday February 6th, Earth time, it is the start of spring for year 36 using the aforementioned calendar system. 
Monday February 1st the position of the planet Mars, with respect to the Earth and the Sun, places this planet at what is called eastern quadrature. At that orbital position Mars, and actually any outer planet, is at a 90 degree angle from the Earth as this graphic shows, and the 
