It's a shitty cellphone pic, but I'm pretty sure the bigger white dot there is Venus (and the smaller one might be Mercury; not 100%). My wife had said they were super close.

Saturn is supposed to be around too, but I don't know where in the sky off the top of my head -- basically what stuck from what she said was "look west just after sundown" -- but I saw these two on the way home from work and got all nerdy excited about it.

Way brighter in person, obviously, but it was cool to see so I thought I'd share.

That's Venus and Jupiter. Mercury's rising/setting with the sun, completely drowned from view right now.

Saturn's on the near-exact opposite side of the sky.
http://www.fourmilab.ch/cgi-bin/uncgi/Yourtel?aim=6&z=1

Awesome. I appreciate the clarification! I guess it should be "Jupiter through the pines" then.

No problem. My armchair astronomical knowledge comes in handy sometimes.

Too bad there isn't a planet called Sovereign.

Earlier outside I put my penis through the vines.

So "the vines" is your slang for hairy man-butt?

When I looked out the window I saw Uranus.

Oh yeah? Well... uh... umm...

You're absolutely right.

/hangs head in defeat

There's really no come back from Uranus.

stoned amateur astronomy is the shiznit on the she-bitch corndog. those are def venus and jupiter. real simple to see mars these hot summer nights. biggest its been in 2 years time just not in the same side of the night sky. mercury is really easy to see right around sunset not sure what that bloke above was rattling on about. a couple days time it will be even easier or maybe that was saturn. have to check my charts again after i saturate the brain with dumb down dope and daddy's calm down juice again. feeling the effects or lack thereof. time to wear hte bicycle helmet.

The 'bloke' was going off of an astrological ephemeris. Mercury was two degrees from the Sun yesterday, and mere minutes from the Sun today. My 2-D reference suggests it's obscured. But yeah, I wasn't taking latitude into account so maybe it isn't totally obscured at very low light hours. Star charts are greek to me and I can't see for myself, it's cloudy in Oregon.

smoke dope travel to mercury. easy star chart equation for ya today right now. fucked if the man is gonna keep this freak flag down.

about 10 days ago mercury, mars, jupiter, and venus were all "up" in the sky at the same time, though mercury was only for a brief moment right at dusk.

saturn was also visible around midnight, so in one night you could see 5 planets with the naked eye.

i read somewhere that some folks believe that the "star of bethlehem" was actually an instance of a jupiter & venus conjunction, and that one such occurance was in 2 BC

anyway, this is a nifty picture :



http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap120307.html

Brave (brave brave) Sir Robin is the best name ever.

Chickening out and running away...