Re: Five Planets : Wed Mar 14, 2012 10:18 pm  

Ferocious Aardvark wrote: The simple way to always be fully informed, for free: 1. Find your latitude and longitude using a simple resource like http://www.getlatlon.com/ where you enter your place name, then zoom to your house, and copy you Lat and Long into a document. Please note, your longitude may well have a minus!! 2. Go to the excellent free resource, http://www.heavens-above.com/ and register as a user. Then set up your home co-ordinates as your current observing site (and PS you can set up as many different sies as you want; for example, I always set one up if I'm going away on holiday, then print out the charts and other info i want to take with me) This gives you a personal sky map for every day, automatically. You can also look at the Sky Chart, and see why the planets look like they do, from the Earth's perspective, as it shows you whereabouts they are relative to each other in space, in their respective orbits. or just get Google Sky Map?

Ferocious Aardvark wrote: The simple way to always be fully informed, for free: 1. Find your latitude and longitude using a simple resource like http://www.getlatlon.com/ where you enter your place name, then zoom to your house, and copy you Lat and Long into a document. Please note, your longitude may well have a minus!! 2. Go to the excellent free resource, http://www.heavens-above.com/ and register as a user. Then set up your home co-ordinates as your current observing site (and PS you can set up as many different sies as you want; for example, I always set one up if I'm going away on holiday, then print out the charts and other info i want to take with me) This gives you a personal sky map for every day, automatically. You can also look at the Sky Chart, and see why the planets look like they do, from the Earth's perspective, as it shows you whereabouts they are relative to each other in space, in their respective orbits. or just get Google Sky Map?

Re: Five Planets : Thu Mar 15, 2012 3:09 am  

Beetnik wrote:

or just get Google Sky Map?

Well, here's a chart of the path of the ISS across the sky from my house on 23 March, and a table with exact info of the event.



How do I do that in Google Sky, then?

Re: Five Planets : Thu Mar 15, 2012 11:15 am  

One of the explanations for the biblical 'Star of Bethlehem' is a planetary conjunction between Jupiter and Venus like this as there was one that would have been clearly visible over Jerusalem in the east in August 3 BC, where Jupiter was particularly bright at the time and Venus was right on top of it so it would have looked like a large single star and shone much brighter than anything else in the sky.

Re: Five Planets : Thu Mar 15, 2012 6:02 pm  

sally cinnamon wrote:

One of the explanations for the biblical 'Star of Bethlehem' is a planetary conjunction between Jupiter and Venus like this as there was one that would have been clearly visible over Jerusalem in the east in August 3 BC, where Jupiter was particularly bright at the time and Venus was right on top of it so it would have looked like a large single star and shone much brighter than anything else in the sky.

Nah, that is just a rubbish explanation, as the planets in the course of a night just move right across the sky from one side to the other like everything else appears to.

What you would actually need is an object that in fact orbited in a retrograde motion, so that it maintained precisely the same position relative to Bethlehem. A bit like a geostationary satellite. No natural phenomenon ever has or ever could achieve the feat.

Even a bright object near the Pole Star would be no good, as it would only be of any use as a guide to travellers approaching from due south, from anywhere else (especially north) they'd be royally fooked using that as a GPS.

Re: Five Planets : Thu Mar 15, 2012 7:28 pm  

Ferocious Aardvark wrote:

Nah, that is just a rubbish explanation, as the planets in the course of a night just move right across the sky from one side to the other like everything else appears to.

What you would actually need is an object that in fact orbited in a retrograde motion, so that it maintained precisely the same position relative to Bethlehem. A bit like a geostationary satellite. No natural phenomenon ever has or ever could achieve the feat.

Even a bright object near the Pole Star would be no good, as it would only be of any use as a guide to travellers approaching from due south, from anywhere else (especially north) they'd be royally fooked using that as a GPS.

Maybe thats the whole problem with Christianity, maybe they were following Jupiter, realised that they'd never be able to catch it as every night it started from a different position to where they'd left it and just decided that any old new born would do, the next one they find gets the gold and they can finally get to fook off back home again.

I think Monty Python may be closer to the truth than we think.