It’s 18:30 PST here. There is a bright star/planet/something in the sky. It’s directly west, or a little north of west, and seems to be (estimating) about 30º elevation. Higher, and to the left, about the 10:30 position, is a small reddish ‘star’. If I hold my hand out as if signalling ‘Stop’, the two objects are about a hand’s width apart, from the tip of my pinky to the lowest joint of my left index finger.
I didn’t even look, but I’m 99% sure the answer is Venus.
ETA: Yup.
Oh, and the reddish body above and to the left of Venus is Mars.
Decent photo if you scroll down here.
Thanks, Kimstu It looks like you’re right. I assumed the reddish ‘star’ was Mars.
I did look up Venus, but the site I found talked about it being visible in the morning.
It might not be a current cite. Venus is always either a morning star or an evening star, but it changes every year or two.
And Kimstu, 99% is perhaps a bit overconfident. At least 5-10% of the time, the answer is actually Jupiter.
Quick rule of thumb, stars twinkle, planets don’t.
If you have a smart phone, you might want to look into an app like SkyView for help identifying things in the night sky. It’s pretty amazing stuff. You just point your camera towards the sky, as if you’re taking a picture, and it overlays the position of the stars based on your GPS and phone’s accelerometer info. Super cool–I wish we had something like this when I was a kid.
They’re alright tonight.
Saw Sirius rising over the ocean last night, wind moderate, and it was scintillating like mad. Looked utterly awesome.
If there wasn’t a foot of snow on my deck, I’d be out there with my scope.
You don’t live in L.A., I take it? Everything twinkles, including some stars.
That sounds awesome. I’ll have to look into it.
I’ll second Skyview. I’ve used it all over the northern hemisphere and it has never failed me.
Even I knew it was Venus. I saw it myself, there were only two things I could see in the sky (climate here is so humid and foggy and my property so infested with redwood trees that I rarely see much in the way of stars), the moon and this super-bright star, upon which I said to myself, that really has to be Venus.
Nitpick: it was at it’s greatest separation from the sun (disc half-lit)-greatest brilliance will be on the 18th of February.
Oh goddammit, I came in to post that :mad:
Heck, I’ve seen the full moon twinkle from Yosemite Valley.
(Full disclosure: non-trivial quantities of tequila may have been involved.)
Stars twinkle not because they radiate energy (planets reflect light) but the amount of space the light from them travels causes disturbances.