Mercury is the only evening planet, but only visible during the first week of May. It sets around the end of astronomical twilight. It shows as a crescent in a telescope.
Saturn rises soon after Midnight and is 30 degrees up at dawn.
Mars follows Saturn an hour later. It is as bright as Saturn. Mars approaches Jupiter and passes it half a degree south on May 29th.
Venus and Jupiter are only half a degree apart from each other at the beginning of the month. Venus moves so fast that their separation increases to 30 degrees by months end.
Venus shows a small disk getting fuller while Jupiter gets high enough so that its bands and other features show up in telescopes.
On the 17th and `18th, Neptune is relatively easy to find in binoculars since it is less than a degree north of Mars.
The Moon is very hard to see on May 1st since it is such a thin crescent, one of the thinnest ones you have seen in your life. The following evening, it sits just above Mercury. By the 6th, the Moon is next to Pollux. The Full Moon the day after the Lunar Eclipse rises only 2 degrees from Aldebaran. On the 26th and 27th, it is in the vicinity of Venus.
The important event this month is the Total Lunar Eclipse on the evening of May 15th. The moon rises at 7:06 pm (Tucson Time/UTC-7). Sunset is at 7:15 pm. The partial phase starts at 7:28. Totality lasts from 8:29-9:54 pm. The partial phase ends at 10:56 pm. This is a deep total eclipse since the northern part of the Moon is at the center of the Umbra, right at 9:12 pm. In Tucson, TAAA will have a viewing party with telescopes on the University of Arizona Mall near Flandrau from 7:30-10 pm.
