Here again is the sky chart

Guy Ottewell's website and weblog
In a room in Pembroke College, Cambridge, hangs a round picture in a square frame.

Here is an attempt to show how several things are now arranged in space.
Mercury will on August 16 stand out far on the evening side of the Sun – the farthest for the year. And yet it is the year’s worst apparition of Mercury!

Eric David commented on Continue reading “A recent scene”
The Perseid meteors should be abundant, in the night between August 11 and 12 – Thursday evening into the dark morning hours of Friday morning.

Picnickers, yesterday, looked out from the Greenwich Observatory (or near it) over the universe (or at any rate over London).

The crescent Moon will make a show with distant Jupiter, low over the sunset horizon on Friday, August 5.

And there is, in a sense, a third body in this line-up, a human-made one called Juno. Continue reading “Jupiter closely touched by two”
Mercury, overtaking Venus, passes only half a degree north of it as seen by us.

Spatial view of the travels of the three inner planets in July, with sightlines from Earth on July 16. Actually the sightlines are at the beginning (0 hour) of the day by Universal Time. The overtaking happens at the end of the day, 23h UT (which is 7 PM by summer clocks in eastern North America. The planets are exaggerated 400 times in size, the Sun 5. The dashed line is the vernal equinox direction, our customary baseline in the celestial sphere. Continue reading “Queen Bee and Drone”