Sky & Telescope is making the following animation and illustrations available to the news media. Permission is granted for one-time, nonexclusive use in print and broadcast media, as long as appropriate credits (as noted in each caption) are included. Web publication must include a link to SkyandTelescope.com.

At dusk in late March 2004, all five naked-eye planets will be above the horizon at the same time. Venus and Jupiter are so bright they can't be missed. This simple sky chart will help you find fainter Mercury, Mars, and Saturn. Click on the image to download a publication-quality version (137-kilobyte JPEG) by anonymous FTP.

Sky & Telescope illustration.

Nightly from March 22 to April 4, 2004, there's a fine sky show playing in the west at dusk as the waxing Moon passes one planet after another and brilliant Venus moves past the Pleiades star cluster. A publication-quality illustration for each evening throughout this period is available by anonymous FTP. Each is a 75- to 80-kilobyte JPEG; click on a date to download the corresponding sky scene: March 22, March 23, March 24, March 25, March 26, March 27, March 28, March 29, March 30, March 31, April 1, April 2, April 3, April 4.

Sky & Telescope illustration.

This is a single image from a 14-frame animation showing the changing appearance of the dusk sky from night to night in late March and early April 2004. The animation is available in two sizes (428 x 289 pixels, as shown here, and 720 x 486 pixels) and in two formats (animated GIF and QuickTime) by anonymous FTP: small animated GIF (154 kilobytes); large animated GIF (370 KB); small QuickTime movie (152 KB); large QuickTime movie (338 KB).

Sky & Telescope illustration.

Sky Publishing Corp. was founded in 1941 by Charles A. Federer Jr. and Helen Spence Federer, the original editors of Sky & Telescope magazine. The company's headquarters are in Cambridge, Massachusetts, near the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. In addition to Sky & Telescope and its Web site, SkyandTelescope.com, the company publishes Night Sky, a new bimonthly magazine for beginners, with a Web site at NightSkyMag.com; two annual magazines, Beautiful Universe and SkyWatch; an annual wall calendar called Celestial Wonders; as well as books, star atlases, posters, prints, globes, and other fine astronomy products.