What's Up in the Night Skies for January 2013?

By Nancy Atkinson - December 27, 2012 at 11:24 PM UTC | Observing
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Jane Houston Jones from JPL provides a video preview of the night skies in the first month of the new year. There will be plenty of planetary conjunctions with the Moon: Saturn, Venus, Mars and Jupiter will all be snuggling up with the Moon throughout the month. Jane also suggests using NASA's

Eyes on the Solar System

to keep track of where all the different missions are throughout the solar system. If you haven't yet checked out this amazing site, it is an interactive 3-D "universe" where you can explore the cosmos from your computer. You can fly along with almost any NASA mission, hop on an asteroid, see the entire Solar System moving in real time, or re-live the Mars Curiosity landing. But you have the option of controlling when and where you are. It's fully addictive!

Nancy Atkinson

Nancy Atkinson

Nancy Atkinson is a space journalist and author with a passion for telling the stories of people involved in space exploration and astronomy. She is currently retired from daily writing, but worked at Universe Today for 20 years as a writer and editor. She also contributed articles to The Planetary Society, Ad Astra (National Space Society), New Scientist and many other online outlets.

Her 2019 book, "Eight Years to the Moon: The History of the Apollo Missions,” shares the untold stories of engineers and scientists who worked behind the scenes to make the Apollo program so successful, despite the daunting odds against it. Her first book “Incredible Stories From Space: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Missions Changing Our View of the Cosmos” (2016) tells the stories of 37 scientists and engineers that work on several current NASA robotic missions to explore the solar system and beyond.

Nancy is also a NASA/JPL Solar System Ambassador, and through this program, she has the opportunity to share her passion of space and astronomy with children and adults through presentations and programs. Nancy's personal website is nancyatkinson.com