Night Sky Map and Planets Visible Tonight | Hacker News Reader

Night Sky Map and Planets Visible Tonight

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Try Sky Map app. It's fun to go on a walk when the sky is clear and identify constellations and planets.

It was originally made by Google, then open sourced in 2012.

https://github.com/sky-map-team/stardroid

Is this what we missed?

> LOOK UP! Rare space event tonight as Venus, Saturn, Jupiter and Moon line up - how to see

> https://www.express.co.uk/news/science/1533360/space-news-as...

Have a look tomorrow and tell me they aren’t kind of lined up again.

It’s very exciting to see this at sunset. Tilt your head so that the solar system is flat and you can truly feel that you are on the side of a sphere with the sun in the middle and the planets in the plane.

Venus is coming towards you (looking down on the system, the planets rotate counter clockwise.) Try to imagine what that will look like in the sky.

Isn’t “down” in space “towards the nearest/strongest gravity well?”

I’m surmising that what you mean is, if you headed towards Polaris far enough to get perspective on the entire solar system, then from that vantage point the orbits are counterclockwise?

All of the planets orbit the sun on approximately the same plane (since we started as a swirling pancake of gas and dust that eventually snowballed into planets, and then you and me). It looks like this: https://media.nationalgeographic.org/assets/photos/000/285/2...

If the orbital plane was a surface of water and the northern hemisphere is bobbing above the water, then up is perpendicular to the plane (away from the water, looking down on the top of Earth).

I can't believe I was {HOWEVER OLD I AM NOW} when I learnt that the Moon is 'upside down' when seen from the Southern Hemisphere. I mean, of course it would be - but I'd never made that deductive leap.

Made me feel like a fool, especially given I made my at-the-time pregnant partner crease her nose in not-quite-credulous but also sorta-believing suspicion when I told her that the Japanese don't see a Man in the Moon, rather a Rabbit, because on that side of the Earth they see the opposite side of the moon. I could only maintain the pretense for a few minutes before she scolded me :)

It was odd to see Orion doing a handstand!

And I got lost on a car trip, thinking the midday Sun was in the south. Good thing I was a back-seat passenger.

i have been observing the planets line up for a few weeks now. i never noticed before. yesterday i tried your suggestion, and yes, i could really sense where i was on earth in relation to the other planets and stars.

suddenly it became obvious how the latitude is calculated based on the position of stars

obviously as the outer planets are slower to move around the sun, so they are going to stay in that position for some time to come. pluto is there too, if you have the telescope to see it.

venus joined the group a few weeks ago, mercury caught up this week and mars will follow in january and somehow they all seem to be staying in the neighborhood until next summer.

so if i interpret this right, there should soon be an opportunity to see all our planets at once.

There's an Android app which does a very similar thing called Nightshift [0].

[0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.waddensky....

Hmm. Just saw this and it seems it's all over. Pity it wasn't posted yesterday morning!

Coincidental timing (or maybe not?). On my walk tonight, I noticed that Saturn and Jupiter were super bright

If you imagine a line from Jupiter to Saturn and continue it again about the same amount (roughly down to the right in the northern hemisphere) you should see Venus, should be brighter than Jupiter.

They've been that way for more than a month. Jupiter is waning in intensity ... a month ago, they were of comparable brightness.

You are probably referring to Jupiter and Venus which are super bright. Venus being the brighter one. Saturn is considerably less bright but still visible and lines up between Venus and Jupiter.

This is fantastic! Marvelous piece of work, thanks.

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