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Palomar

Member

From: USA

Registered: 2002-05-30

Posts: 9,734

Re: All 5 Naked-Eye Planets Visible

*Sky maps courtesy of spaceweather.com.  Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn are all visible at dawn, beginning Christmas morning and continuing after that for a bit more than a week.  :up: 

(I can only give this post 1 date, so tried for a middle date)

http://www.spaceweather.com/images2004/ … st.gif]Sky Map:  Looking East/SE

http://www.spaceweather.com/images2004/ … st.gif]Sky Map:  Looking West

*Happy viewing and happy holidays! 

--Cindy

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We all know [i]those[/i] Venusians: Doing their hair in shock waves, smoking electrical coronas, wearing Van Allen belts and resting their tiny elbows on a Geiger counter...

--John Sladek (The New Apocrypha)

Stu

Member

From: Kendal, Cumbria, England

Registered: 2001-09-04

Posts: 318

Website

Re: All 5 Naked-Eye Planets Visible

Very nice Cindy! 

Now imagine you're Opportunity, driving carefully around the wreckage of the heatshield... you look west as the sky darkens, and this is what you see...

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v509/ … as-eve.jpg

... and if you zoomed in on the second bright "star" up from the horizon this is what you'd see...

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v509/ … s-eve2.jpg

Not a bad view, I reckon... 

All the best everyone, and here's to a succesful Huygens release tomorrow!

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Stuart Atkinson

Skywatching Blog: [url]http://journals.aol.com/stuartatk/Cumbrian-Sky[/url]

Astronomical poetry, including mars rover poems: [url]http://journals.aol.com/stuartatk/TheVerse[/url]

Palomar

Member

From: USA

Registered: 2002-05-30

Posts: 9,734

Re: All 5 Naked-Eye Planets Visible

Now imagine you're Opportunity, driving carefully around the wreckage of the heatshield... you look west as the sky darkens, and this is what you see...

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v509/ … as-eve.jpg

*Nice.  Earth "in" Taurus. 

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Since the initial post, Gemini is no longer visible (to my view anyway -- high mountains to the NW) at pre-dawn; thus, can only now see Saturn at night.  Which I did early last evening, as it was rising in the East with the other winter constellations. 

Weather stayed clear and this a.m. saw Jupiter (in Virgo); Mars (I always love it when near its rival, Antares); and now Venus and Mercury are rather companionably close together in the far SE sky.  According to the latest "where are the planets now?" news, Venus will soon appear to move closer to Sol, and so slip away from our view.  Time to get out and see it is now.  Venus is the one unaided-eye -anything- (besides Sol) which never fails to impress me; can't ever take that sight for granted, she's so uniquely brilliant.

--Cindy

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We all know [i]those[/i] Venusians: Doing their hair in shock waves, smoking electrical coronas, wearing Van Allen belts and resting their tiny elbows on a Geiger counter...

--John Sladek (The New Apocrypha)