Six-Planet Parade On Monday: When And Where To See It By A Crescent Moon
From Aug. 17–21, a spectacular 'planet parade' (also called an alignment) features the moon and six planets. getty
A 26%-lit waning crescent moon will shine high above Jupiter and Venus in the eastern sky about an hour before sunrise.
Venus will be the brightest planet, with Jupiter just above it, the next brightest. Above these two planets will be the crescent moon, while below will be Mercury, which will be easiest to see closer to sunrise.
Saturn, visible in the southern sky, is now close to its annual bright 'opposition' on Sept. 21, when Earth will be between Saturn and the sun. As a consequence, it will be at its biggest, brightest and best.
If you plan to rise early this week once to view the 'planet parade,' go for Wednesday, Aug. 20, when a slim crescent moon will be very close to Venus — a beautiful sight.
It's over three years until the next impressive 'planet parade,' when in October 2028, five planets will be visible together again before sunrise.
Monday, August 18: 'Planet Parade' And A Crescent Moon Stellarium
On Tuesday, Aug. 19, the waning crescent moon will have sunk a little lower in the sky and be approaching Jupiter and Venus. At 16%-lit, it will begin to display 'Earthshine' — sunlight reflected onto the lunar surface by Earth's ice caps, oceans and clouds. Although it depends on where you watch from, Mercury will be at its apparent farthest from the sun on Tuesday, Aug. 19, so it will be one of the best mornings to see the 'Swift Planet,' which orbits the sun in just 88 days and is mostly lost in its glare from Earth's point of view. However, arguably, the highlight of the 'planet parade' this week will come on Wednesday, Aug. 20, when a 9%-lit crescent moon will appear very close to Venus.
The Orion constellation rises over a hill through high thin clouds near Black Mesa, Oklahoma. getty
Skywatchers gazing at the 'planet parade' will likely notice some familiar stars on the right-hand side of Venus, Jupiter and the moon. One of the most iconic and easily recognizable of all the winter constellations in the Northern Hemisphere, Orion is visible right now before sunrise because the sun recently passed through that part of the sky in May and June. The most obvious shape is Orion's Belt — three stars (Alnitak, Alnilam and Mintaka) in a straight line —with red giant Betelgeuse roughly between the belt stars and Jupiter. On the other side of the belt star is the bright blueish star Rigel. If you stay up long enough to see Mercury rising, look to the right for Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky. The stars of Orion's Belt will point directly at it as it appears on the eastern horizon close to sunrise. What's Next In The Night Sky
Mercury will gradually disappear from the pre-dawn sky as it continues its speedy journey around the sun, leaving Saturn, Jupiter and Venus as the only planets visible to the naked eye. Skywatching highlights in September include Saturn at its biggest, brightest and best as it reaches its annual 'opposition" on Sept. 21, a total lunar eclipse on Sept. 7 for those in Asia, Africa and western Australia, a stunning view of a waning crescent moon, Venus and bright star Regulus on Sept. 19, and a partial solar eclipse on Sept. 21 for the Pacific Ocean. Further Reading Forbes 'Planet Parade' Myths Debunked And How To Truly See It — By A Stargazer By Jamie Carter Forbes Your Ultimate Guide To Meteor Showers And The Perseids — By An Expert By Jamie Carter Forbes NASA Urges Public To Leave The City As Milky Way Appears — 15 Places To Go By Jamie Carter
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USA Today
16 minutes ago
- USA Today
You can catch Mercury's big light show. It's called the greatest elongation.
August is full of celestial events, and this week marks a milestone for the 4.503 billion-year-old planet known as Mercury. Being such a small planet that lies close to the sun, Mercury can be difficult to see. That'll change on Aug. 19, when planet-gazers on Earth can look up and see Mercury at its greatest distance from the sun, according to Time and Date. This period where it is farthest from the sun, called the greatest elongation, happens twice every 116 days or so (or about every four months), reported Time and Date. Elongation is essentially how far apart the sun and a planet appear when we look at them in the sky, the Pierce College Science Dome in western Washington shared on social media. Because the planet appears farthest from the sun, the sun's glare doesn't impede our ability to see the planet as much, the college said. More on greatest elongation and why it happens so often According to Pierce College, there are multiple types of greatest elongations, including: The one space enthusiasts will see on Aug. 19 is the greatest elongation west, best visible in the morning, according to Time and Date. The next greatest elongation east will occur on Oct. 29, making Mercury most visible in the evening, Time and Date said. According to Pierce College, Mercury reaches its greatest elongation six or seven times a year. Other planets such as Venus reach greatest elongation only twice per year, the college said. This is because Mercury orbits closer to the sun, and it doesn't take as much time for the planet to make an entire orbit around the sun. More news: Want to see the planet parade? Here's when to view the last show of 2025 How can I see Mercury at its greatest elongation? The best time to see Mercury during its greatest elongation is about 30 minutes before sunrise, according to EarthSky. It's best to look in the direction of the sunrise as the sky gets lighter. According to Time and Date, those wanting to see Mercury should be cautious. 'Never point binoculars or a telescope in the direction of the Sun,' the website warns. 'It can cause permanent eye damage. Do not try to observe Mercury while any part of the Sun is above the horizon.'
WIRED
17 minutes ago
- WIRED
WIRED Roundup: Why GPT-5 Flopped
By Zoë Schiffer and Jake Lahut Aug 18, 2025 2:01 PM On this episode of Uncanny Valley , we dig into WIRED's latest—from crude deportation memes to GPT-5's negative reception. Photo-Illustration:In today's episode, our host Zöe Schiffer is joined by WIRED's senior politics writer Jake Lahut to run through five of the best stories we published this week—from how the Trump administration is creating and sharing memes to make fun of deportations, to NASA's ambitious goal to put nuclear reactors on the moon. Then, Zöe and Jake dive into why users kind of hated OpenAI's GPT-5 release. Mentioned in this episode: OpenAI Scrambles to Update GPT-5 After Users Revolt by Will Knight The Trump Administration Is Using Memes to Turn Mass Deportation Into One Big Joke by Tess Owen Trump Family–Backed World Liberty Financial Sets Up $1.5 Billion Crypto Treasury by Joel Khalili Inside the 'Whites Only' Community in Arkansas by David Gilbert Why the US Is Racing to Build a Nuclear Reactor on the Moon by Becky Ferreira Join us live in San Francisco on September 9th. Get your tickets here. You can follow Zoë Schiffer on Bluesky at @zoeschiffer and Jake Lahut on Bluesky at @ Write to us at uncannyvalley@ How to Listen You can always listen to this week's podcast through the audio player on this page, but if you want to subscribe for free to get every episode, here's how: If you're on an iPhone or iPad, open the app called Podcasts, or just tap this link. You can also download an app like Overcast or Pocket Casts and search for 'uncanny valley.' We're on Spotify too. Transcript Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors. Zoë Schiffer: Hey, this is Zoë. Before we start, I want to share some exciting news with you. We're doing a live show in San Francisco on September 9th, in partnership with KQED. Uncanny Valley co-hosts, Lauren Good and Michael Colore will sit down with our editor-in-chief, Katie Drummond, and a special guest, for a conversation that you really won't want to miss. You can use the link in the show notes to grab your ticket and invite a friend. We can't wait to see you there. Welcome to WIRED's Uncanny Valley . I'm Zoë Schiffer, WIRED's Director of Business and Industry. Today on the show, we're bringing you five stories that you absolutely need to know this week, including the less than warm reception that OpenAI's GPT-5 model got from users. I'm joined today by WIRED's senior writer. Jake Lahut. Jake Lahut: Great to be back. Zoë Schiffer: So our first story this week is about how the Trump administration has been posting memes to make fun of deportations. Have you seen these at all? Jake Lahut: Yes, unfortunately I have. Yeah. Real fun, funny stuff. Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, real dark. So WIRED contributor, Tess Owen, reported on this pattern of different official government accounts on social media using whatever is viral at the moment and tailoring it to promote and make fun of deportations. And this is especially popular in the accounts of the Department of Homeland Security and Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, and the White House. So for example, there's this catchy jingle that belongs to Jet2, which is a low budget British Airline that's been making the rounds lately on social media. [Archival audio]: Nothing beats a Jet2 holiday, and right now- Zoë Schiffer: Last month, DHS and the White House made a joint Instagram post incorporating the tune on top of footage of ICE detainees in handcuffs boarding a deportation plane, and the caption reads, "When ICE books you on one-way Jet2, holiday to deportation, nothing beats it." Jake Lahut: Oh my God. Zoë Schiffer: I honestly have such a hard time thinking about who would find that funny, even if you really are anti-immigration, I don't know another way to say it, it just seems so mean. Jake Lahut: Yeah, if you could have seen our faces when that was playing. Yeah, darling, hold my hand, I don't want to ever see anything like that ever again. Something I've picked up on ever since covering the Trump 2024 campaign, which is, there's obviously still a lot of really weird, cringy, messed up stuff going on here, but it's also an attempt, at least from their point of view in the weird bubble they're in to kind of mainstream this stuff. Zoë Schiffer: Right. And this is actually the point, according to Tessa's reporting, she spoke to experts who said that the goal of this is really to normalize what's happening. The point isn't just to be crude or cruel, it's strategic. This sparked a bunch of backlash. It's not just you and me, but in response to WIRED's reporting, the White House gave a statement that basically just dismissed these concerns and said that it, "won't apologize for posting banger memes." Moving on to the world of crypto. Our colleague, Joel Kalili, reported on a cryptocurrency business called World Liberty Financial, which I'm sure you're familiar with too, Jake. Jake Lahut: Oh, yeah. Zoë Schiffer: Which has come up with a clever workaround, I guess you could say, for the fact that crypto can't technically be traded on the stock exchange. So World Liberty is now allowing investors to speculate on the price of its coin by way of a little known company that is legally listed on the NASDAQ, called Alt-Five Sigma Corporation. Are you familiar? Jake Lahut: I am not as familiar with that word mash. Zoë Schiffer: So this is where it gets kind of sticky because technically Alt-Five is marketed as a crypto payments company, but in practice, the deal will turn the stock into a sort of proxy for their crypto coin, basically allowing investors to bet on the asset without the hassle and risk that comes with holding a crypto coin themselves. It sounds very crypto. It's a scheme that has raised eyebrows, to say the least. One of Joel's Wall Street sources told us that what this move effectively does is build a holding company with the sole objective of creating a treasury for their crypto coin, about $1.5 billion worth, which could inflate the market capitalization of the coin. Jake Lahut: And this is also controversial because this starts opening up a different can of worms where potential investors and politically motivated actors who are all in this orbit can have even more influence over the administration. We've already seen the way you can do that with the meme coin, now with World Liberty Financial they're obviously affiliated with Trump's adult sons, and the Trump family controls 22.5% of the WLFI coins and about a 40% equity stake in World Liberty Financial. So this is definitely the big game in town when it comes to buttering the Trump family's biscuit. Zoë Schiffer: Right. I love how you said that. Yeah, basically, if you want to potentially try and curry favor with Trump, you buy into one of these schemes, and maybe you'll get invited to a fancy crypto dinner, which has happened before. Maybe you get something else. But even just the optics here are pretty suspect. Jake Lahut: Yeah. And in a little side item we had in my Interloop Newsletter this week, we had some new data on the somewhat stunning lack of enforcement from the Trump administration across the tech sector, but crypto in particular had pretty much everyone who had been facing any kind of legal action from the Biden administration, having their enforcement actions either dropped completely or paused. And in one instance, we're looking at the maybe first ever pardoning of a company from one of these things. So you don't need to just pony up the money for these things and expect a legislative win, you can just get the heat pulled off of you on the regulatory front. Zoë Schiffer: Right. So our third story, I'm really waiting for one that's not incredibly depressing, but right now we're going all the way to Arkansas where our colleague, David Gilbert, reported that a group of Americans are building a "whites-only community," which they call Return to the Land. The group believes that white people and western culture are facing extinction because of an influx of immigrants and minorities. And according to the group's founder, access to the community is open only to people of white European ancestry who share common views on things like segregation, abortion, and gender identity. Return to the Land's president shared their intellectual inspiration with David, the reporter, saying that they were partly inspired by venture capitalist and the son of immigrant parents, Balaji Srevenesin, and his book, The Network State, which promotes the idea of a digital-first community of people with shared values, with the aim of gaining a degree of sovereignty and autonomy. Jake Lahut: And look, not just America, long history of a bunch of wacky well-intentioned or just downright weird utopias, but this one, a little different, because you're having the sovereignty to be racist. But in all seriousness, Zoë, how is any of this legal? Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, I mean, that is the real question. So the whole premise goes back to the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which prevents housing discrimination based on race or religion, but Return to the Land claims that the structure of the community is more akin to a private member's association. And so far local authorities seem to agree. Arkansas Attorney General, Tim Griffin, told WIRED that his office has found nothing illegal about the community. Surprise, surprise. Jake Lahut: Yeah, it's like Erlich Bachman's incubator from Silicon Valley, but for white supremacy and racism. Zoë Schiffer: Exactly. Exactly. Okay, one more before we take a break. This one is about how the US is racing to build a nuclear reactor on the moon. WIRED contributor, Becky Ferreira, recently reported that NASA is fast tracking a plan to build a nuclear reactor on the moon by 2030 under a new directive from the agency's interim administrator, Sean Duffy. Jake Lahut: Sean Duffy, only in America, can you go from the Fox and Friends weekend couch to being Secretary of Transportation, to also doing this. He's a busy, busy man, multitasking- Zoë Schiffer: He's a busy, busy man. Jake Lahut: To the moon. Zoë Schiffer: So his stated motivation is that the US has to stay ahead in what he deems to be the "moon race" with China and Russia. Both countries have expressed their desire to place nuclear reactors on the moon, and it's an appealing idea because nuclear energy is a powerful continuous source of energy. We're hearing about it more and more with the AI race. And so the directive laid out by Duffy is to quickly design, launch, and deploy an operational 100 kilowatt reactor to the lunar South Pole within five years that would be built with commercial partners, and experts say this would be difficult, but not completely impossible. If it actually gets accomplished, it would potentially change the space industry. They could start designing space systems around what we want to do and not what smaller, often limited power allows them to do. Jake Lahut: With the added bonus of effectively using a nuclear flag to prevent other countries from landing in this area, so, all right. Sounds promising, question mark? Zoë Schiffer: It is, and there's always a but, there's also a mountain of safety and regulatory concerns that this would bring obviously, because we're literally dealing with nuclear energy in outer space. So how do you contain the uranium for one, how do you make sure to stay in your sovereign zone so you don't accidentally start a space war? All these questions are coming up and accelerated process could make it even trickier. Jake Lahut: Yeah. I extremely do not want to be here for a space war, so catch me pulling a Yoda in the Degaba system. I'll hide it out until the all clear has been given. Zoë Schiffer: I'll be there with you. Okay. Coming up, we'll dive into why OpenAI's latest model release ended up being kind of a flop despite all of the hype. Stay with us. Welcome back to Uncanny Valley . I'm Zoë Schiffer, I'm joined today by Jake Lahut, and we're discussing the user response to OpenAI's release of GPT-5. OpenAI's GPT-5 model was meant to be like a world changing upgrade to the wildly popular ChatGPT. Sam Altman had tweeted out the Death Star, they said it was going to have kind of virtuosic skill and PhD level intelligence, and I think a lot of people felt like it was going to bring us basically up to artificial general intelligence. Were you aware of the hype leading up to everything? Jake Lahut: And I was definitely taken aback by the term PhD level intelligence in the hype for all of this stuff. And what I started to wonder about was like, what is that going to look like compared to the more sycophantic glaze you up version of GPT-4.0? Zoë Schiffer: So yeah, it was too much hype. They'd actually tried... I talked to sources about this, internally they were testing various models that they wanted to call GPT-5 and none were meeting the mark. And so I think there was a fair amount of pressure internally. If you talk to people who work closely with Sam, they'll say he really likes to have a big splash every three to four months, once a quarter at least. And so I think the combination of the fact that they hadn't released a major model in a while, I mean the open source models notwithstanding, they had been hyping GPT-5 for so long. There was this push to be like, "We have to release a model, a big model, and we kind of have to call it GPT-5." Then the day it launched, there was supposed to be this feature that could automatically route your query based on how complicated it was, like if you were asking something very simple, it would route you to a cheaper model basically. And if you were asking something more complicated, you might get a reasoning model. That broke according to Sam Altman, the CEO. And so the model just seemed dumber all day than it otherwise would. So I don't know. There was a lot going on. Jake Lahut: And at least from my more layman outside politics world perspective on this, it does seem like a... From the economics to be a rather smart, more efficient way to go about it. But the part that really stood out to me though was more of the "personality" of GPT-5 and this revolts that it started on Reddit and among the ChatGPT super users, of which I am admittedly not one. Zoë Schiffer: Right, yeah. So this was really fascinating. I think one thing that happened, and again I'm pulling this from conversations with a bunch of sources inside the company, is that they really wanted to optimize for coding ability this time, because that's really been Claude's edge, Anthropic's AI model, and obviously it's a huge revenue driver. It's kind of the first area where we've seen a big widespread commercial adoption in a way that could do the thing that AI companies have been saying all along will be done, which is it'll disrupt and augment jobs in a pretty serious way. Engineers really are using these tools and companies are really pushing the tools on their own workforce. But like you said, the reason that regular people like models isn't often because of their coding ability. It's because they genuinely like talking to them. It's a lot more about the personality, about the warmth, even about the sycophancy, although they've fixed a large part of that in the latest release. And so people completely flipped out. We were looking at Reddit and people were saying, "This is erasure, what have they done? Take me back to 4.0." Jake Lahut: "You took away my friend." Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, I mean it really, really impacted people. I think on the most extreme ends, you see people who have, what looks like perhaps like a mental health crisis, they're so attached to the model, but then you just have complete power users who are like, "This is part of my minute by minute life. What have you done? You didn't warn me." Jake Lahut: And this is where the introspective aspect of these tools, the kind of desire for self-understanding, the people who are not advisably from any medical perspective, but they are trying to use these bots for something akin to therapy. And what it made me think of when I saw this rolling out was, is this maybe the beginning of something bigger where there's kind of a departure between the "regular consumer" experience and demand for AI versus the business application. We may not all have the same definition of intelligence when it comes to these models, and that some of us really just want a buddy, a companion, a way to know ourselves better. And then other people are like, "No, I just need a little team of bots here to manage, get my stuff done, I'm going to babysit and I'm going to tell them what to do and live my life." And yeah, I don't know where that goes. It does seem like it's revealing something maybe genuinely new about the human condition in a way that I would not have expected. Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, I mean, I think it's been a learning for OpenAI. They've been kind of baffled. I've seen these conversations internally where they're like, "I guess people don't care as much about intelligence as we thought." The narrative around intelligence is critically important for fundraising, if nothing else, they really need to raise gobs of money and being like, "We're about to achieve artificial and general intelligence, AI will be able to do all of these things," is really important for that. But for everyday users, it really makes me think of this story that is kind of famous inside OpenAI About the night before the ChatGPT release in November of '22, Ilya, he was testing out what was going to be ChatGPT and asked it 10 pretty hard questions. And he felt like five of them, he got pretty good responses, and five were unacceptably bad. And they had this moment where they were like, "Do we release this? I don't know if it's good enough." And then they decided to move forward. And what we saw was the general public was like, "This is amazing." Because they'd solved a product issue. It wasn't necessarily about the model, which had been out for a long time. It was like the interface to interact with the model was really the unlock. And I think OpenAI, that really is more and more the company's edge, even though it really sees itself as a research lab. It's a product lab in a lot of ways, and it'll be interesting to see how that changes the company moving forward. Jake Lahut: Absolutely. Zoë Schiffer: That's our show for today. We'll link to all the stories we spoke about in the show notes. If you're in San Francisco, don't forget to get your tickets for the September 9th event with KQED. Make sure to check out Thursday's episode of Uncanny Valley , which is about what Palantir actually does and why it's so controversial. Adriana Tapia produced this episode, Amar Lal at Macrosound mixed this episode. Pran Bandi is our New York studio engineer. Kate Osborn is our executive producer. Conde Nass, Head of Global Audio is Chris Bannon and Katie Drummond is WIRED's Global Editorial Director.
Gizmodo
3 hours ago
- Gizmodo
Picking a Spot for NASA's Lunar Nuclear Reactor Is Trickier Than It Sounds
In a bold, strategic move for the U.S., acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy announced plans on Aug. 5, 2025, to build a nuclear fission reactor for deployment on the lunar surface in 2030. Doing so would allow the United States to gain a foothold on the Moon by the time China plans to land the first taikonaut, what China calls its astronauts, there by 2030. Apart from the geopolitical importance, there are other reasons why this move is critically important. A source of nuclear energy will be necessary for visiting Mars, because solar energy is weaker there. It could also help establish a lunar base and potentially even a permanent human presence on the Moon, as it delivers consistent power through the cold lunar night. As humans travel out into the solar system, learning to use the local resources is critical for sustaining life off Earth, starting at the nearby Moon. NASA plans to prioritize the fission reactor as power necessary to extract and refine lunar resources. As a geologist who studies human space exploration, I've been mulling over two questions since Duffy's announcement. First, where is the best place to put an initial nuclear reactor on the Moon to set up for future lunar bases? Second, how will NASA protect the reactor from plumes of regolith—or loosely fragmented lunar rocks—kicked up by spacecraft landing near it? These are two key questions the agency will have to answer as it develops this technology. The nuclear reactor will likely form the power supply for the initial U.S.-led Moon base that will support humans who'll stay for ever-increasing lengths of time. To facilitate sustainable human exploration of the Moon, using local resources such as water and oxygen for life support and hydrogen and oxygen to refuel spacecraft can dramatically reduce the amount of material that needs to be brought from Earth, which also reduces cost. In the 1990s, spacecraft orbiting the Moon first observed dark craters called permanently shadowed regions on the lunar north and south poles. Scientists now suspect these craters hold water in the form of ice, a vital resource for countries looking to set up a long-term human presence on the surface. NASA's Artemis campaign aims to return people to the Moon, targeting the lunar south pole to take advantage of the water ice that is present there. In order to be useful, the reactor must be close to accessible, extractable, and refinable water ice deposits. The issue is we currently do not have the detailed information needed to define such a location. The good news is the information can be obtained relatively quickly. Six lunar orbital missions have collected, and in some cases are still collecting, relevant data that can help scientists pinpoint which water ice deposits are worth pursuing. These datasets give indications of where either surface or buried water ice deposits are. It is looking at these datasets in tandem that can indicate water ice 'hot prospects,' which rover missions can investigate and confirm or deny the orbital observations. But this step isn't easy. Luckily, NASA already has its Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover mission built, and it has passed all environmental testing. It is currently in storage, awaiting a ride to the Moon. The VIPER mission can be used to investigate on the ground the hottest prospect for water ice identified from orbital data. With enough funding, NASA could probably have this data in a year or two at both the lunar north and south poles. Once NASA knows the best spots to put a reactor, it will then have to figure out how to shield the reactor from spacecraft as they land. As spacecraft approach the Moon's surface, they stir up loose dust and rocks, called regolith. It will sandblast anything close to the landing site, unless the items are placed behind large boulders or beyond the horizon, which is more than 1.5 miles (2.4 kilometers) away on the Moon. Scientists already know about the effects of landing next to a pre-positioned asset. In 1969, Apollo 12 landed 535 feet (163 meters) away from the robotic Surveyor 3 spacecraft, which showed corrosion on surfaces exposed to the landing plume. The Artemis campaign will have much bigger lunar landers, which will generate larger regolith plumes than Apollo did. So any prepositioned assets will need protection from anything landing close by, or the landing will need to occur beyond the horizon. Until NASA can develop a custom launch and landing pad, using the lunar surface's natural topography or placing important assets behind large boulders could be a temporary solution. However, a pad built just for launching and landing spacecraft will eventually be necessary for any site chosen for this nuclear reactor, as it will take multiple visits to build a lunar base. While the nuclear reactor can supply the power needed to build a pad, this process will require planning and investment. Human space exploration is complicated. But carefully building up assets on the Moon means scientists will eventually be able to do the same thing a lot farther away on Mars. While the devil is in the details, the Moon will help NASA develop the abilities to use local resources and build infrastructure that could allow humans to survive and thrive off Earth in the long term. Clive Neal, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Earth Sciences, University of Notre Dame. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
