Slashdot Mirror
Monday's Planet Views Best Until 2036
An anonymous reader writes "NASA is reporting that Monday night, March 22nd, offers a rare, naked-eye glimpse of our five prominent astronomical neighbors--Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, and the Moon--in close proximity in the night sky, near to the familiar Orion constellation. This contrasts with the picture of the 'Fab Five' shot by Voyager looking back on the inner solar system. Monday's aligned view is not likely to appear in this configuration again until 2036."
Google is your friend
Being rather busy at the moment...
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
To that I'd like to add that KStars is great planetarium program, and Celestia is just an awesome program in general.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
Just a quick correction: the five objects visible include Mercury, not necessarily the moon. See the article for details.
You'll probably need a fish-eye lens more than a wide-field. The spread is 135 degrees, which I'm not sure really counts as a small section of sky.
I'd say that it's less a chance for astrophotography and more for a chance to go outside and view the 5 nake-eye planets with your own two eyes. Not many people have seen all 5 of them, particularly Mercury.
Shameless self-promotion: this open-source applet lets you figure out which naked-eye planets you're seeing, without having to install software. (Your browser has to support Java.)
Find free books.
saturn, though, has its rings perpendicular to us right now, making it one of the most spectacular views for another 50 years or so. venus is still incredibly close, this past august it was the closest it's been for 60,000 years.
well, i'm glad.
Stars are so far away that they're effectively points... zero radius, zero area. So when a little disturbance in the atmosphere distorts the light coming from them, you see the effect as a twinkle. A planet is much closer and shows a disc (radius something larger than zero) even if it's too small to see with the naked eye. Now the same atmospheric disturbances average over the area of the disc and the effect tends to cancel... a little dimming in one area this moment, a similar dimming in another area next moment, so you see a much steadier intensity -- no twinkling.
From the article:
In April and May of this year, two naked-eye comets, C/2001 Q4 and C/2002 T7, will grace the twilight skies. To spot the cosmic balls of dust and ice look to the west at dusk or dawn.
Look to the west at dusk *or* dawn? Yeah right. Probably got shortened by an overzealous editor from the correct "to the west at dusk or the east at dawn". Amazingly inept editing for an astrobiology site. The linked article has more (and correct) information.
Be faithful to your obsessions. Identify them and be faithful to them, let them guide you like a sleepwalker. JG Ballard