No, it won’t make much difference, and no, that wasn’t your point. You were talking about whether the planets were visible at night or not, and your longitude doesn’t affect that. You are about to slip from “confused” to “stubbornly ignorant.”
This isn’t politics, where everyone is entitled to his opinion. This is science, and there are right and wrong answers. If somebody corrects you, at least take the time to look it up before you argue about it.
The planets are where they are, and they don’t jump back and forth across the solar system depending on what city you are in. If (hypothetically) Jupiter is on the zenith at midnight in Honolulu, it will be very close to the zenith at midnight in Mecca. Your distance east or west of your time zone meridian will make it a few minutes off of what the almanac predicts, but that’s it, and it won’t matter for naked eye observation.
Think of someone on Polaris looking down on our solar system. The planets are at various distances and angles from the sun. Except for Mercury, which FAPP can only be seen for a few minutes of a few days each year, they are essentially stationary over the course of a day, at least for the purposes of naked eye astronomy.
So if Jupiter is straight up to someone in Calcutta at midnight, that means it’s on the line through the earth from the sun. That line moves only one degree per day (because the earth is moving around the sun in 365 days), and Jupiter is moving in the same direction (more slowly), so we’ll ignore the net half degree and say the line is stationary. The earth is rotating under it — various cities and countries are brought around to the line, and then pass on.
Whichever city or country is brought to that line as the earth rotates will have their midnight when they hit the line, and when they look up, Jupiter will still be there. So EVERYBODY sees Jupiter high in the sky at midnight. Midnight for Tokyo is a different UT than midnight in Kansas, but unless you’re looking for an eclipse or something, all you need to worry about is your local time.
Incidentally, for the guy who talked about Jupiter being “full”: it’s always full, as are all of the planets, except for Mercury and Venus. The reason it’s brighter than usual is because it’s closer than usual. When it’s on the same side of the sun as the earth and on the line connecting them, it’s about 186 million miles (i.e., the diameter of the earth’s orbit) closer to us than when it’s on the opposite side.
The four Galilean moons are bright enough to be theoretically visible to the naked eye, but are always so tight to Jupiter they cannot be resolved. By analogy, think of a bonfire lit by campers with four lanterns on an island a couple miles away – the lanterns would be visible by themselves at night but their light is lost in that of the bonfire.
… OMG! :smack: