Planning the Experiment

Uranus and Jupiter

Because they orbit the Sun at different rates, the planets spend some of the year on the other side of the Sun, which makes them difficult to observe with the Liverpool telescope.

To see how the planets move around the Sun, follow this link to the NSO's Electric Orrery.

Start the Orrery and use it to work out which are the best planets to observe over the next couple of weeks. Remember that the best images are obtained when the planets are on the night-side of the Earth, i.e. when we look away from the Sun.

Write down which planets you think are the best ones to observe.

Thankfully, the Go Observing tool calculates how "observable" each of the planets are, so we can check our results when requesting images during the next stage.