when out walking the dog earlier and counted no less than 4 planets
venus and jupiter high and bright in the west
draw a line down from these 2 to see mercury just above the horizon just after sunset
and mars glowing pink in the east near the moon
I used to love astronomy as a kid and wanted to be an astronaut although some would say i only got as far as a space cadet
saturn rises after midnight in the east
if you are not sure if its a planet stars twinkle ,planets just glow
I'm glad I got the right one. There is another version with "Your Mom" at the end of it.
If you liked those check out anything with Carl Sagan on youtube. Pale blue dot springs to mind
We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.
The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.
Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
bollox to all that :laugh:
I can see mars as clear as day from my study window about 10 moonwidths at 10 o'clock to the moon
normally very hard to spot
if you have binoculars or a small telescope you can see the ice cap
LLL
