Steve Adams wrote: > BTW - What an incredible sight Venus is in the southern sky at the moment! - > It almost looks bright enough to be seen in broad daylight. Venus is bright enough to be seen in broad daylight. A more serious than me amateur astronomer friend pointed it out to a group of us at my gliding club launch point a few weeks ago at around midday. He knew where to look, of course. I think it helped a bit that there was a band of high cloud close by allowing the eye to focus properly. In a completely blue sky it is harder to pick out such small points if your eyes aren't quite focussed properly. Through binoculars Venus showed a crescent quite nicely. I was looking for Jupiter the other evening (a few days before the STS-100 launch) just after sunset - mainly to try to estimate the earliest time at which it would be at all sensible to try looking for the ISS and/or shuttle (the STS-100 orbiter and ET were seen from parts of Europe but it was just too light here to have a chance). Even having found Jupiter, without any other reference nearby, I still had to search a bit to find it again a minute or two later. As it turned out, I was under a big shower as the STS-100 launch went by. The weather cleared up and I saw the ISS on the next pass but by the time the orbiter came round again the orbit plane was well to the south west and encrouching cloud from that direction blocked the view. Ed Davies High Wycombe, England. N51.608 W000.805. P.S: I glad I'm not the only one who has trouble with spelling words like "Satellite". I never could get the hang of double consonants. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe from SeeSat-L by sending a message with 'unsubscribe' in the SUBJECT to SeeSat-L-request@lists.satellite.eu.org http://www2.satellite.eu.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Apr 27 2001 - 08:14:17 PDT