A good night for Practice..

[pabrides]

This is a heads - up , shipmates...

Have you ever seen Mars before?  How about Saturn?  How about Venus?  How about Jupiter?

Well, two of them, Mars and Saturn, are laying close to the moon tonight.... especially Mars - that big beautiful red planet that is the next farthest from the sun after Earth.  Tonight, being the 19th of Sept, you can see Mars just about half a degree or so from the edge of the waxing moon.  Saturn lays just a few degrees to the East of those two. 

Mars and Saturn are about the brightest objects up there and easily identified.  And if you can see Venus in the evening sky as well you will have a wonderful opportunity to get shots of these four bodies at about the same time.  If you can locate Jupiter that makes 5 interesting targets that will give you hours of great planet and moon reduction practice.  Jupiter will be just above and to the left of Venus in the evening sky.  

http://earthsky.org/tonight/moon-saturn-...mber-17-19


good hunting
Joe

[pabrides]

This is a heads - up , shipmates...

Have you ever seen Mars before?  How about Saturn?  How about Venus?  How about Jupiter?

good hunting
Joe

Well, Shipmates, I went to the river last night about two kilometers from my home - the clearest safe area around me - about 20 minutes before sunset and scanned the heavens.  The moon was already visible so I had my bearings.  The sky turned a pale blue here and a pinkish orange there as the sun descended below the horizon and within another half hour all four planets peaked through our stratosphere.  What a sight; Venus was brilliant, Jupiter echoed with joy; Saturn's rings seemed just on the verge of visibility; Mars blushed while very near the half faced moon..

It never ceases to amaze me when i think about the photons of starlight that in some cases have traveled for millions of years at the speed of light - and when they hit my eyeball they end their journey right then and there. 

Smooth sailing
Joe

[CarlosPindle]

All was a glorious sight!

Joe, thanks for the "heads-up". That was a wonderful display! Yes, you're so right- a few, hundreds, thousands or millions of light years to reach our eyes. And you were there to see them! Curious, isn't it, that you and I can stand on different parts of the earth and see the same light. Isotropic scattering of light from a star- and the entire universe, generally speaking, sees the same light. And more- that a star, from our point of view, has no sensible diameter. It's a dot. I wonder if astronauts see them clearly as just that?

Carlos