Five planets visible tonight

[Eric Mc]

A bit closer together tonight.

Venus is getting closer to Jupiter each night until Tuesday at which point it reaches the furthest westerly point in its orbit as seen from earth and starts moving back towards the sun. It will gradually get closer to the sun until it moves between us and the sun later in the year giving us another Transit of Venus.

[Puggit]

Dusted down the telescope, dug out the planetary imager (posh webcam!) and then discovered Meade don't make drivers for 64 bit machines.

Lucky I work in virtualisation, and requisitioned a Win2003 VM to act as my OS instead. Let's see what I can produce tonight!

[Eric Mc]

I love it when people get all technical.

Even if I haven't a clue what they've just said.

[Puggit]

Here you go Eric, hope this helps:

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/telescope

[don4l]

Puggit said:

Dusted down the telescope, dug out the planetary imager (posh webcam!) and then discovered Meade don't make drivers for 64 bit machines.

Lucky I work in virtualisation, and requisitioned a Win2003 VM to act as my OS instead. Let's see what I can produce tonight!

So... Did you get a result?

The seeing seemed OK to my naked eye tonight.

Jupiter and Venus were absolutely stunning.

I sent my wife out to look at them. Normally, I would have to go out with her and show her where to look. Tonight, I didn't need to give her any help.

She came back in and just said "wow".

Later, at about 9 o'clock, I saw a very bright meteor which was heading westwards from the Plough. It seemed to finish with a fireball. Wonderfull!

I've just gone out to see if I can spot Saturn, and the bloody sky has completely clouded over. It was completely clear 20 minutes ago.


Don
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[Puggit]

Sadly we were beset with fog not long after nightfall, so I didn't get any images - I was really struggling to get my virtual machine to like the camera, very temperamental. However, I managed to get 5 year old puggit jnr to see Jupiter and the Gallilean moons through the naked scope

Of course, as you state, to the naked eye it was a wonderful sight - probably the best view