If you read the Telegraph in that link, "The chart shows the sky at midnight at the start of March.". It's now March 13th! The problem with these infernal planets is they keep moving!

The simple way to always be fully informed, for freehttps://www.getlatlon.com/rl
where you enter your place name, then zoom to your house, and copy you Lat and Long into a document. Please note, your longitude may well have a minus!!

2. Go to the excellent free resource, rlhttps://www.heavens-above.com/rl and register as a user. Then set up your home co-ordinates as your current observing site (and PS you can set up as many different sies as you want; for example, I always set one up if I'm going away on holiday, then print out the charts and other info i want to take with me)


This gives you a personal sky map for every day, automatically.

You can also look at the Sky Chart, and see why the planets look like they do, from the Earth's perspective, as it shows you whereabouts they are relative to each other in space, in their respective orbits.

Just now, Mars is prominent in the southeast, and Saturn is nice in the south. Jupiter and Venus went to bed hours ago!

The site also gives you an incredible amount of other personalised data, with just a single click. For example, any visible passes of the international space station. Or check out Iridium flares.

Current magnitude (brightness) of Venus is -4.1 and Jupiter -1.9. The bigger the minus, the brighter the object. The scale is logarithmic, and a difference of 5 magnitudes means a brightness difference of exactly 100 times. A difference of one magnitude corresponds to a brightness difference of around 2.51

The brightnesses change a great deal, due to (a) the planet's distance from Earth and (b) their position relative to Earth-Sun. If you picture the Sky Chart, you can see how and why sometimes a planet will be "full face" illuminated as viewed from Earth, and at other times it will be gibbous, or a crescent.

I was well impressed last night, saw the two planets (above) to the Northwest of LBA at around 8pm, by far the brightest things in the sky, sort of puts all your daily shoite into context doesn't it ?

It was too cloudy down our way last night. Hoping it may be better tonight. Would love to go somewhere rempte from lights from towns to see them in their full glory along with all the other stars. The only times I can recall seeing the stars in their full glory where on Anglesey many years ago and lying on my back at midnight after a sumptious meal and wine, in the Okavango Delta.

Well tonight is "closest approach" and it is looking good, if a little hazy, in Bradford at the moment. The pair should be clearly visible in the southwest as soon as it starts to get reasonably dark while Mars, an obvious bright reddish object (especially contratsed with Venus) is at the same time slowly rising in the east, to be followed by Saturn a few hours later.

Seems cloud is forecast for home tonight. I suppose I'll have to wait and see what it's like when I get there.

or just get Google Sky Map?

Well, here's a chart of the path of the ISS across the sky from my house on 23 March, and a table with exact info of the event.



How do I do that in Google Sky, then?

One of the explanations for the biblical 'Star of Bethlehem' is a planetary conjunction between Jupiter and Venus like this as there was one that would have been clearly visible over Jerusalem in the east in August 3 BC, where Jupiter was particularly bright at the time and Venus was right on top of it so it would have looked like a large single star and shone much brighter than anything else in the sky.

Nah, that is just a rubbish explanation, as the planets in the course of a night just move right across the sky from one side to the other like everything else appears to.

What you would actually need is an object that in fact orbited in a retrograde motion, so that it maintained precisely the same position relative to Bethlehem. A bit like a geostationary satellite. No natural phenomenon ever has or ever could achieve the feat.

Even a bright object near the Pole Star would be no good, as it would only be of any use as a guide to travellers approaching from due south, from anywhere else (especially north) they'd be royally fooked using that as a GPS.

Maybe thats the whole problem with Christianity, maybe they were following Jupiter, realised that they'd never be able to catch it as every night it started from a different position to where they'd left it and just decided that any old new born would do, the next one they find gets the gold and they can finally get to fook off back home again.

I think Monty Python may be closer to the truth than we think.