In early February 2025 six planets line up over my London roof, the night is clear, the atmosphere is beautifully calm and the Beast, my giant 16-inch Newtonian telescope, is ready to pounce!
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As darkness falls Saturn is already very low on the horizon. Normally looking through 200miles of atmosphere turns a planet into a blurry mush but on this night the atmosphere is calm enough to bag Saturn’s rings and 5 of its 200 odd moons.
Titan is the second largest moon in the solar system with great seas of methane which surely wouldn’t be nice to swim in🤣. Dione, Rhea and Tethys are as far as we know relatively boring but Enceladus is a gem. Sea water has been caught spouting from beneath this moon’s icy shell. Ice moons have long been considered places where we might find life and as Enceladus’s ocean spouts onto its surface we will be able to land a probe here and check for life.
Venus looks huge through the beast but is annoyingly covered in a thick blanket of white cloud. However, my old Baader Cak filter (8nm bandpass at 394nm) which looks like purple welding glass allows just about enough UV light through to detect strange UV absorbing bands in the clouds. There is a chance some kind of alien algal bloom floating in Venus’s balmy 20 degree , soupy, sulphuric acid clouds might be responsible. Whilst the idea sounds insane I’m happy to report both NASA and ESA are sending missions to our nearest neighbour in the early 2030’s to find out.
Uranus is so far away its barely kissed by the sun’s rays and is therefore very dark. Boosting the brightness reveals a huge amount of noise but by averaging out the best 30,000 frames from a 10 minute video of 60,000 frames the noise is cancelled out to reveal a blue body and a white cap.
The live view of Jupiter through the Beast is stunning. We see the Great Red Spot (which is shrinking at a rate of 580 miles per year), the incredibly volcanic moon Io whose internals are kneaded like bread by Jupiter’s insane gravity and whose surface in irradiated like Chernobyl’s melted core by Jupiter’s insanely huge magnetic radiation belt and we can also see a band of growing storms on the Northern Edge of Jupiter’s Northern Equatorial Belt. These storms didn’t exist three months ago!
Despite being half the diameter of Earth Mars boasts 4 ginormous volcanoes. The smallest, Pavonis Mons, is the size of mount Everest and the biggest, Olympus Mons, would be considerably bigger than two mount Everests stacked on top of each other.
The Beast reveals that all 4 volcanoes are capped with clouds. I say in the video that the volcanoes might be a good place to search for life. You need liquid water to support life but Mars’s surface is now frozen. These volcanoes might have enough residual heat to melt the ice. But of course, I don’t know for sure and in all honesty the consensus is that we’re now looking for alien fossils on Mars rather than actual living life.
Unfortunately clouds meant I was unable to get more than a fleeting glimpse of Neptune. TBH it was very low on the horizon and I suspect that to reveal anything more than a blurry blob you would need to film it for at least 10 minutes when it is high in the sky (like how we managed to reveal detail on Uranus).
I hope you enjoyed this special night when our planetary neighbours all popped up above London to say hello😁