Pretty much due southwest, at about two thumbs* above the horizon, is a bright object. It was there last night as well (and probably before, but I didn’t notice it until last night). It’s extremely bright; brighter than I can recall Venus ever being. The color seems to shift if you stare at it long enough, from star-white to almost a pale peach. Of course, the colors are most likely an optical illusion.
I’m tempted to rule out Venus, as there’s an almost-equally-bright object in the northeast right about now, which I take to be Venus.
*By “thumbs” I mean, if you hold your thumb out horizontally at arm’s length, the distance from the bottom to the top of the knuckle. I’m not skilled enough in math/geometry to try to estimate the distance in degrees.
Or you could look for a planetarium to visit. They usually charge an admission fee, but they’re more of a show.
According to the Step Into Placesonline resource guide, there are planetaria located in Rockford, Rock Island (John Deere Planetarium), River Grove, Peoria, and Joliet.
According to last year’s State Journal Register, there’s one in Jacksonville High School, Springfield, IL. But I don’t know if they’re open to the public.
And if you have an smart phone you can install the Google Sky app for free and just point your phone at the object in the sky and a star map will display telling you what you are seeing.
Stellarium is always my recommendation for questions like this. It’s beautiful, intuitive, and free.
Just load it up, set a location and time of interest, and you’re place in the center of a pannable, zoomable representation of the night sky looking as realistic as you could hope for. It’s very easy for beginners to get answers. If you have an iPhone or iPad, Distant Sunsis a similar piece of software for that platform. It’s not free, but it’s excellent.
I’m a big fan of Heavens-Above, but reading flat star charts can be disorienting until you’re used to them. There are alternatives that make browsing around a virtual sky more appealing.
Correct me if I’m wrong here, but wouldn’t we need to know the time the OP was looking? The north star holds relatively still and everything rotates around that, so the planet in question would start in the southeast and end in the sourthwest, right? So it could be Jupiter, if the time were right.
As much as I love the program, it doesn’t seem to be very accurate. I’ll point it south and it’ll show me west, or I’ll point it below the horizon and it’ll show me the zenith. And I’ll turn as much as 30 degrees while the screen still holds still.
Better to set it to manual and use it as a ‘map’ instead of a ‘GPS’, if you take my meaning.
I use Google Skymap all the time. Its accuracy is a function of your phone, not the software. If the compass and gyros in your phone are sub-par, the sky map will bounce around and point in the wrong directions. On a good phone, it will be spot on.
By the by, Venus only appears in the early dawn or dusk hours, since it is inside the Earth’s orbit (that is, closer to the sun than we are). If you are seeing an object deep in the night, it is not going to be Venus.
