Your Guide To Seeing Five Planets After Sunset

Clerk Note: When the planets align...

+++

Your Guide To Seeing Five Planets After Sunset

http://www.davidreneke.com/five-major-planets-align-for-august/

By: Dave
Date: 2016-08-02

This August, Australian stargazers will have a rare opportunity to see five visible planets in the night sky at the same time with the naked eye. Anyone in the world will be able to see this event without a telescope or binoculars.

This August, they can be found together forming a line that stretches from low in the north-west to high overhead in the north. The planets are visible from across Australia for an hour or so after local sunset. Venus, Jupiter, Mars and Saturn are bright enough to be seen during twilight when the rays of the setting sun still brighten the sky.

Mercury, the faintest of the planets, is the one that’s most easily drowned out and it’s always a little tricky to spot. But don’t leave it too long after sunset before looking for the planets. After about an hour or so, Venus and Mercury will disappear below the horizon. The earlier you see them, the higher they’ll be.

Artistic representation of how the alignment would look from most parts of Australia in August

Re-launch in T minus Nine Days...

Clerk Note: On the anniversary of the late Vatic Master's birth in nine more days, the Vatic Project comes roaring to back to life in the heat of election 2016. Planned specials are: Trump day, Clinton day, Sanders/Stein day, Johnson day, police state date, drone day...

The Vatic Project has no goal of becoming a source for breaking news. The inherent laziness and efficiency of the Vatic Clerk almost guarantees this outcome, because the publication queue gets filled in the past when time is available with articles authored and published earlier than that. Themes and patterns arise that make sense to be grouped together, that further jukes with timeliness.

The Vatic Project has a goal of four interesting postings per day, appropriate labels, and "read more" breaks. When this is exceeded -- such as on Trump Day --, consider it a fluke rather than a commitment, trend, or benchmark.

Further, the Vatic Project has a goal of becoming a legacy and a research tool. Labels are instrumental to this end. The labeling project of old content is underway, but estimates with the current labor force put completion Q1 of 2017, if laziness and procrastination doesn't interfere significantly. The Vatic Clerk is kicking himself for not creating a monthly task to add labels and "read more" breaks to Vatic Master's efforts instead of putting it off until all at once after her passing.