When are the planets visible in New Jersey, USA during 2008…thanks for any help?
Which planets are visible does not depend much on longitude, only latitude, and even then only mildly. Saturn and Mars are visible for now in the evening west, setting not too long after the Sun, in the vicinity of Regulus, in Leo the Lion. Jupiter rises sometime before 9:00 p.m. and is up more or less all night; it is the brightest thing going in the southeastern sky in the late evening and is hard to miss. Mercury rises a bit more than an hour before the Sun, and will be visible to the careful observer. Venus is still rounding its orbit from behind the Sun and is visible for just a few minutes after sunset. (See the first link below for more on these planets.) Neptune rises about an hour after Jupiter, in Capricornus. It does not require an 8-inch telescope to see–in fact, it can easily be seen in binoculars. The problem is not seeing it, but identifying it. There are thousands of stars in the sky about as bright as Neptune, and figuring out which one it is without a chart would be
