After being fixtures in our evening sky for several months earlier this year, our two nearest planets, Venus and Mars, have disappeared into the twilight. Venus is now beginning to make an appearance in our morning sky, whereas Mars remains hidden behind the sun for the next several months.

The evening sky now becomes the province of our solar system’s two largest worlds. Saturn, which was at opposition—directly opposite the sun in the sky—late last month, is well up in our eastern sky as darkness falls and remains visible for almost the entire night. Jupiter, which will be at opposition in early November, rises during the mid-evening hours and is high overhead an hour or two before the start of dawn.

Venus now rises one to two hours before twilight and does so for the remainder of this year. Mercury also puts in a morning-sky appearance this month, rising around the beginning of dawn during the third week of September.

While Mars has been getting most of the recent attention as far as spacecraft missions are concerned, the other planets are not being ignored. A joint mission between the European Space Agency and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, called BepiColombo, made its third flyby of Mercury in late June, and will make three more flybys of that planet before settling into orbit around it in late 2025.  

The only spacecraft currently around Venus is the Japanese Akatsuki mission, which has been in a distant orbit around the planet since late 2015. Two NASA missions, Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry and Imaging (DAVINCI); and Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography and Spectroscopy (VERITAS), are currently in development and are expected to launch late this decade or early next decade.