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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?" `":" #");}
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.)
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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.