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Three Planets Racing this Weekend
William Robinson writes "This report asks you to keep your eyes on the skies this weekend, when a rare triple-planetary alignment is going to happen. It promises a stellar show for star-gazers. Scott Young of the Manitoba Museum Planetarium says the planets in question -- Mercury, Venus and Saturn -- are all big enough to be seen without a telescope."
Time to go and dig some mummies in Egypt
" And while star-gazers will be able to obscure all three planets simply by holding their outstretched thumb to the sky, Young reminds them appearances can be deceiving.
"In reality, the planets are millions of kilometres apart," he said. "They only appear close in the sky because of our perspective. Saturn is actually over a billion kilometres behind Mercury."
Oh thank God. I thought they were all going to crash into one another, showering the earth with deadily meteors or something. THANK YOU for thet reminder, Mr. Young.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
Venus is similar - but less so.
Saturn is often in the sky, and is a beautiful sight through a telescope.
I can't wait to see them all so close together - Let's hope for clear skies!
This event has convinced me to buy a telescope! I must see this first hand. What sort of telescope would be ideal for an amateur astronomer such as myself to view such a planetary event?
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Considering I live in Houston, I doubt I'll be seeing anything. Light pollution is atrocious. When I want to see the night sky, I have to go camping.
"Only one thing, is impossible for god: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." Mark Twain
I want to know what odds the people in Vegas are giving to Mercury. I've got a lucky feeling about that planet!
Next year, the planets will all align themselves to spell out the word, Longhorn, to kick off Microsoft's new advertising campaign for the upcoming version of Windows. This of course, all depends if thier wireless networks can't be hacked again while they are sending the signals to the planets.
Some people are idiots. Other people are not.
" "What we're seeing is the clockwork of the solar system," Young said." ...Which is what we see 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. But thanks for pointing out the obvious. I'm still trying to decide who is responsible for this innane conversation, that Young guy or the person asking him to expound on the alignment.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
Binoculars and a star chart.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
It promises a stellar show for star-gazers.
I'm afraid you've misunderstood this. It's not a stellar, it's planetary.
Terrorists can't threaten a country's freedom and democracy. Only lawmakers and voters can do that.
When aligned, the planets will fit into a piece of sky the same size as a full moon.
Is that the low hanging moon or the smaller moon?
liqbase
To catch the show, go outside after sunset today and find a spot with a clear view of the western horizon,...
man that sounds like alot of effort. How about if I just bookmark the 'planet' tag over at Flickr?
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/planet/
After a six car US F1 GP, only three planets racing this weekend?
Business Voyeur
Sir,
For most people, those "uranus == your anus" jokes went out of style by the time the person was five or six years old. You, sir, are a pathetic cockfool.
Sincerely,
CyricZ
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Are there any simulations of this event that we can view online? Indeed, I would even enable Flash to watch such a simulation!
Or is this the sort of thing you need a Cray and hundreds of thousands of lines of Fortran to model accurately?
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Time could be helpful...
For some informative information on this "rare" event have a looko n_mercury_venus_saturn.html?2362005/
at http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/conjuncti
__
Sigs are like arse-holes, everybody has one
I don't see how this is so unusual, since it's an astrologer's job to look into the future, not to look into space (that would be an astronomer's job).
Badass Resumes
(for the ill-informed, it's the music from 2001: A Space Odyssey that goes: duhhhh....duhhh....DUHHHHHH... [dun dun dun dun dun dun])
A guy walks into a bar... well, I forgot the joke, but the punchline is that he's an alcoholic.
Celestia rocks for all your astronomy needs, if you have a decent video card. Accept no substitutes.
I admit that I'm a lazy sod, but even I can be arsed enough to get out of my chair and go outside to see it!
And that, my liege, is how we know the Earth to be bannana-shaped.
Not specifically for this event, but a really awesome simulator for astronomy stuff in general is celestia. http://www.shatters.net/celestia/
Click on the earth, hit g (actually celestia starts you at earth), you can hit o to mark orbits to make it easier to find the planets (hit p to show labels to identify the planets themselves.)
I hit shift-g to go to the surface of earth and then find the planets. Can give you a good idea where to look really. Being on the surface isn't particularly important at first, don't want the planet being between you and your destination until you are sure it wouldn't be.
It doesn't always much like things really do, especially with atmospheric simulation not being particularly complex in celestia, but it is cool none the less. Particularly to click on one of the three planets close together, hit g, then look at everything from their perspective.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I meant ctrl-g, not shift g, a really cool app, for those playing around, hitting 'h' selects sol, then you can hit g to get back to familiar territory.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I assume the phrase triple alignment arises because we see three planets near each other in the sky, but this really means that four planets (counting Earth) are nearly in line with each other.
It's probably not so uncommon for three planets to be nearly colinear, it's just rare that we are in a colinear position to see them.
Abolish Copyright. Restore Freedom.
Scientists renamed Uranus in 2636 to end that joke, once and for all.
Now it's called Urectum.
"Stop failing the Turing test!" -- Dilbert
Hello,
If you need a good starchart to find stars/constellations/planets, i have one big recommendation for you, it's called skymap:
http://skymap.com/products.htm
you can use it in a demo version which is already very useful for a starter.
Way to go! =)
At least camping is an option. I live on the East Coast, and real darkness is many hours away. And even then the horizons are usually obscured by trees. But even I can see the conjunction.
I'm sure the light pollution is pretty bad in Houston, but Saturn and Venus are easily visible even against that, and given those indicators it's not hard to find Mercury. You may have to go to the 'burbs rather than in the city proper, but I bet you could find it on top of a large building. The planets are pretty bright, and the problem in a city is more about horizon than light pollution.
If you have a Linux box with KDE, it might have come with KStars, which is a very nifty program. I just pulled it up, and the three planets are really close together.
weeaboo?
I am forced to conclude you are the master of the obvious. May others take heed of your wisdom.
I almost fell out of my chair when I RTFA. "Mercury is a planet few people, even astrologers, have ever seen." WTF? Is this Slashdot or the Nancy Reagan hotline? There's a better article at Sky and Telescope without any of the mumbo jumbo.
The first stage of the alignment has started! It only happens once every five thousand years, and evil people are ready to find the triangle and take over the world if someone doesn't stop them!!!!
Out of curiosity, does a full alignment of the planets only happen once every 5,000 years?
No good deed goes unpunished. - Avon, Blake's 7
My cult and I have known about this for years, we're having a Kool-Aid party in honor of our impending transformation.
I trust you all will marvel at our new godhood!
MoM++ - A Classic Expanded - [Master of Magic 1.5]
http://mompp.sourceforge.net/
that Earth is BETWEEN Saturn and Venus, there fore the only planet's we'll see lined up are Mercury and Venus?
The bits on the bus go on and off... on and off... on and off...
Thing is, the conjunction isn't really all that interesting, scientifically. It's interesting mostly because it's rare, and it's a way to get the vigorously nonscientific to actually watch the planets move across the sky. Go out on two successive nights and you can watch them move relative to each other.
No biggie for your college-educated, Slashdot-reading brain, but a lot of people are bored stiff by science. Turn on Jeopardy some day and watch as the board clears of every category except Science. Not always, but too often.
There's an awful lot of people who don't really get how the planetary orbits work, and probably DO think that they would collide. I bet you know at least some of them. Take them out and show them the conjunction. Take them out on successive nights and describe how we can figure out the heliocentric universe from the observations.
Surely the article meant astronomers. Since when have astrologers ever taken an interest in actually looking at the night sky (other than to determine, of course, what tomorrow's horiscope brings)?
Well, assuming we are all in a straight line, 2D model... but not all orbits move on the same speed, and our only view of the heavenly sky isn't a direct path to the sun...
So imagine looking up from earth, towards the sun, then to the sun's 11:15, let's say... we have a line up...
They aren't all at the same "position" in their orbits, but they may line up...
MoM++ - A Classic Expanded - [Master of Magic 1.5]
http://mompp.sourceforge.net/
To see what it looks like you could go to APOD, which is good for your little daily Astronomy fix/news.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Literally just before reading this story, I was playing 'Elite II' and trying to navigate to Mercury. If course Elite II isn't the best game in the world, and the task was impossible, as I flew up and down, each time missing and ending up 1+ AU on the other side. Apparently the designers didn't think to give you proper control over your accelerators, nor to give you your speed relative to your destination, but instead to some arbitrary object. So when going to Mercury, my speed was relative to Jupiter, making both the speed controller and indicator completely worthless. At one point, the flow of the stars were showing me going forwards, but Mercury right in front of me was moving AWAY from me! And sometimes I could deccelerate almost instantly, and some times it would take ages until I was right back where I started, making reaching other planets a complete impossibility.
I suppose that's what happens when game designers let technical aspects and graphics get in the way of the interface and playability. The documentation only mentions using the autopilot, but my ship doesn't come with an autopilot! And even when it does, it often crashes me right into planets!
Actually come to think of it, when is someone going to make a PROPER space game? Like Elite, but done properly so it's actually enjoyable to play?
It has the inside track.
I found some simulation images:
...
/
Here is photo1:
Here is the zoomed in annotated version:
Mercury Venus
\
o o o
\
Saturn
liqbase
For a better discription, especially for newbies watch This . I cannot figure out how to Coral catch the video so try to only watch the 1 min version to save their server.
Star Trek, there maybe hope.
cel://syncorbit/Sol%3AEarth/2005-06-25T17%3A49%3A0 8.00000?x=sbsIqCwAe9e+DA&y=DhVf7tVWGQ&z=ZSnBOVkXLQ UQ&ow=0.249240&ox=-0.207134&oy=-0.047122&oz=-0.944 857&select=Sol:Earth&fov=32.524258&ts=0.000000<d =0&rf=71571&lm=2
This is a view from Earth's surface (US East coast) of the three planets. As always, beware of spaces/line breaks in the URL (alt-g to open arbitrary URL).
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
ok ok stop throwing things!
Seriously, I'll bet the view from the moon or other Earth orbit, would be spectacular.
Imagine: Mercury, Earth, Venus and Saturn together in the sky...
Oh to be an astronaut...
If you were trying to make a joke out of this for the /. audience, I'd have gone with "you insensitive clod". Obviously, though, you shun memes. They do that it Soviet Russia, too, only its slightly different over there...
Yes, see below.
... *time passes* .
. . . *time passes*
made for some interesting star gazing the other night.
Friend of mine has a boat on a little lake in northern Illinois (Bangs lake in Waconda), we were out Thursday night and had a good time throwing back some beers and watching the sky.
Just after sunset, I mentioned that I thought it was supposed to be a full moon but it was strange that it hadn't risen yet. I had my bearings turned around and was looking west and couldn't figure out if I was looking at a helicopter light or what -- it must have been Venus, but I've never seen it look that bright.
Over the next 20 minutes or so we watched the moon rise. I don't think I've ever seen it look that big and orange.
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
Anyone familiar with the BA topography with an idea of where I can see this from, clouds permitting of course? Obviously going to the Marin headlands and Mount Tamalpais would be preferrable but that's not a possibility for tonight. I'm in the east bay and hoping I can go up to the Laurence Hall of Science or maybe just Indian Rock (in north Berkeley) and see close enough to the horizon, without the peninsula and Mt. Tam blocking the view.
Not boring.
And yet you still found time for surfing porn sites and FP-ing? Sir, you are an inspiration to all of us.
Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
what was sundered and undone shall be whole
The two made one
By gelfling hand or else by none
Like all prophecy, this is subject to interpretation. What could it mean? Longhorn will be released this summer with a Linux core?!? Google will buy Apple??! Brad and Jen getting back together?!! Oh, the possibilities...
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
Data's Eighth Poem
Written By: Brannon Braga
Then we sat on the sand for some time and observed,
How the oceans that cover the world were perturbed
By the tides from the orbiting moon overhead.
How relaxing the sound of the waves is, you said.
I began to expound upon tidal effects
When you asked me to stop, looking somewhat perplexed.
So I did not explain why the sunset turns red
And we watched the occurrence... in silence... instead.
"Oh drat these computers, they're so naughty and so complex, I could pinch them." --Marvin the Martian
http://skyandtelescope.com/observing/article_1534_ 1.asp
The above URL will take you to the Sky and Telescope web page that covers this event.
"Oh drat these computers, they're so naughty and so complex, I could pinch them." --Marvin the Martian
We had a discussion about those jokes over here. You should have just posted "2636", and picked up the funny mods.
I always thought it was more of a question of how bright they are, than how big.
But, I wanted socialized health insurance!
Of course, real alignments NEVER occur, and if even occurs, in no way can cause any f*** disasters.
What modern Obelix would say today? Of course, "Those crazy Americans!".
Young describes Mercury as an "elusive planet," noting most people, astrologers included, have never seen it.
I guess AstroLogers see Mercury on the Queen of Cups card all the time. But I would guess that most AstroNomers have seen Mercury at least once. Give me a break.