Planets

So the other night Leigh and I decided to get up at 5:30 to go see the lunar eclipse (which was awesome by the way). When I went outside, I looked around the sky a little, which was rather interesting since I've only been seeing the evening sky, which lately has been featuring Jupiter and Venus very fantastically. So its 5:30 and I'm looking around and there are a couple bright objects in the sky and I think to myself "I wonder if..." So I check the Google sky map app on my phone and it turns out that what I saw were in fact Mars and Saturn.

I was wondering whether or not I could catch a glimpse of Mercury too. Its a very elusive thing to try to find since it is so small and so close to the sun in the sky, the only times to catch it are either sunrise and sunset. We didn't catch it that night, too many obstructions, but it turns out that it has been showing up at morning.

So my last evening at USC before break, I casually looked up and managed to catch Venus and Jupiter while they were still up. My parent's house has a nice view of San Pedro harbor. Not the best thing for stargazing, but at least there are no tall structures blocking the view. So I decided that it would be a good idea to get up at 6 to see what I could see. Fortunately the light pollution over the harbor in the early morning isn't so bad. I got Mars and Saturn and a bunch of bright stars and amidst the glow on the horizon, there's another little light, right around where the sky map says it should be. Its too bright to be a star and after a while its pretty clear that its not a plane. The logical conclusion is that it must have been Mercury. So, not only did I catch the hardest planet to see, I caught all five of them in one night.

Here's some images that I picked up off of an astronomy site. Planets: they make me happy!