I hope you’re having a magical Christmas season and hope Santa Claus will be good to you.

In the old carol “The 12 Days of Christmas,” your true love gives you five golden rings on the fifth day of Christmas. Well, we don’t have to wait until the fifth day of Christmas, and we aren’t getting five rings, but right now we have five bright planets in our overnight celestial dome.

Venus and Jupiter are dazzling in the evening sky while Mars, Saturn and Mercury are easily seen in the early morning heavens before twilight.

You can enjoy all five of these planets with the naked eye, but if you’re getting a telescope for Christmas, here’s a great chance to enjoy what astronomers call “first light” with your scope.

Read your instructions and make sure the finder scope or device is lined up or synced with your main telescope. The best way to do that is to look along the horizon for a prominent land object like a church steeple or a flag on a pole. Take your lowest magnification power and widest field of view eyepiece and put it into to your scope.

Next, find that distant object through the telescope, which should be easy to do. Then, making sure the scope doesn’t move, line up your finder telescope or device to that same object. I highly suggest you do this every time you set up your scope, because in transport from the house to your backyard your scope can easily get bumped around enough to get the main scope and finder out of alignment.

It’s also very important to take the telescope outside and let it acclimate to the air temperature. Let it sit out there for a good half-hour before you turn it to the heavens.

Also, make all your eyepieces sit out there with the scope as well. If you don’t, they can really wind up with blurry and/or distorted images.

The evening planets Venus and Jupiter are extremely easy to find since they are the first and second brightest starlike objects in the sky, respectively. Even before the end of evening twilight you can’t miss seeing Venus shining very brightly in the southwestern sky.

Don’t wait too long into the evening to find Venus in the southwest because it sets below the horizon a little more than two hours after sunset.

Don’t be disappointed with what you see through your telescope when you train it on Venus. You won’t see any surface detail and never will because the planet, named after the Roman goddess of love, is completely shrouded in a thick cloud cover of poisonous carbon dioxide and monoxide with acid rain falling out of the thick clouds.

You may also think there’s something wrong with your scope because Venus won’t appear as a disk but rather ovalish. Not to worry. Just like our moon, Venus changes shape from our view on Earth as the planet orbits the sun every 225 days. There are times when Venus even looks like a crescent moon.

The second brightest planet in the evening sky, Jupiter, is almost as bright as Venus and starts out the evening in the southeastern sky near the diminutive constellation Aries the Ram.

Through even a decent pair of binoculars or a small telescope, you can see up to four of Jupiter’s moons that resemble tiny little stars on either side of the planet. The moons are constantly changing their positions around Jupiter because they orbit the largest planet in our solar system in periods of two to 17 days.

If it’s clear enough and the skies are steady enough you might even see some horizontal lines and bands that stripe the planet. These are Jupiter’s cloud bands made of methane, ammonia and other gases.

Keep looking at Jupiter and Venus in the evening sky over the next couple of months as the two bright planets draw closer and closer together. I’ll have much more on that in future weeks.

In the early morning, say around 5 a.m., Mercury, Mars and Saturn will light up your eyes and your telescope in the eastern half of the sky.

Without a doubt, Saturn will be your favorite telescope target in the early morning right now, and it’s one of the best objects to view any time in your scope. I guarantee you will love, love, love your first view of Saturn.

Saturn is very easy to find. As you can see in the diagram, it’s just to the left of the bright star Spica in the faint constellation Virgo the Virgin. Saturn and Spica will look like twin stars to the naked eye with Saturn on the left.

Through your telescope Saturn won’t be very large, but you’ll easily see its ring system that spans a diameter of more than 150,000 miles. It looks so small because Saturn is more than 900 million miles away from the Earth right now, but by mid-April will only be about 800 million miles away and will be larger and clearer in your scope.

The next brightest starlike object to the upper right of Saturn and Spica is Mars, and even with the naked eye it has a reddish hue to it. It’s much smaller than Earth, only about 4,000 miles in diameter.

Through your telescope it will appear as a small red disk with some dark markings on it, which are surface features. Presently, Mars is a little more than 93 million miles away, but by early March it will be about 62 million miles away and may even show a little more detail.

Mercury, the closest planet to our sun, makes a very brief appearance just before morning twilight in the very low southeastern sky. In fact, to see it you’ll have to have a very low tree line to the east.

Mercury will look like a fairly bright star with a pinkish glow to it. Its color is due to the effect of Earth’s thicker atmosphere toward the horizon. Through a telescope it will honestly be a bit underwhelming. Mercury is only about 3,000 miles in diameter and because it’s so low in the sky Earth’s thicker atmosphere will really make it fuzzy.

But hey, you can say you’ve seen five planets in one night!

Mike Lynch is an amateur astronomer and professional broadcast meteorologist for WCCO Radio in Minneapolis and is author of the book, “Pennsylvania Starwatch,” available at bookstores and at his website www.lynchandthestars.com.