What did you see in the sky tonight?

orin stepanek · Post by **orin stepanek** » Mon Jan 09, 2012 1:27 pm

I saw the Moon in the East; Venus in the West and I believe the Seven Sisters overhead; + 2 0r 3 other stars.

starstruck · Post by **starstruck** » Tue Jan 17, 2012 2:15 pm

The last four nights have been excellent, clear nights; great for doing a bit of stargazing!

I've been teaching myself to recognise some of the constellations I'm not so familiar with . . been getting good views of Cygnus diving down towards the north-west horizon at around 9pm, only to remerge 'flying' towards the east in the hours before dawn. Also Leo; I can now pick out the lion's head with relative ease. Been having fun memorizing some of the star names in the constellations too. I've known the shape 'The Plough' (or Big Dipper/Ursa Major) all my life, it was probably the first constellation I ever knew how to recognise, but I've only recently learned the individual star names by heart . . I don't know why it never seemed important to know them before, when it does now.

Les nuits des 'étoiles!!

Beyond · Post by **Beyond** » Tue Jan 17, 2012 4:59 pm

starstruck, what is--->Les nuits des 'étoiles!! <---in english

starstruck · Post by **starstruck** » Tue Jan 17, 2012 5:23 pm

Beyond, I enjoy the music of the classical composer Claude Debussy . . it is a slight distortion of the title of one of his romantic songs for voice and piano, "Nuit d'étoiles", translates as "night of stars" . . I was describing the last few nights as being nights of stars. If you've never heard the song, you've missed a treat!

"Night of stars, beneath your veils, amid your breezes and scents, a sad guitar sighs and I dream of lost loves"

Ann · Post by **Ann** » Tue Jan 17, 2012 5:30 pm

Starstruck, I'm really happy for you, but I'm so envious! My nights have been nights of unbroken cloud covers.

Ann

bystander · Post by **bystander** » Tue Jan 17, 2012 5:40 pm

The night the stars

starstruck · Post by **starstruck** » Tue Jan 17, 2012 6:27 pm

Ann, four consecutive nights of clear skies are pretty unusual here, but with the weather it's always 'swings and roundabouts'. I am certain you'll have clear skies when the mist and rain returns for me. I'm making the most of it while I can.

Bystander, it isn't all that surprising that translators quite often cannot pick up the nuances of language. It's a familiar problem for countries like in the EU. Eats shoots and leaves . .

Beyond · Post by **Beyond** » Tue Jan 17, 2012 6:31 pm

bystander wrote:The night the stars

Throwing the Google translater at me, eh, bystander?
Well, i have Bing, but i've found that it's just as usless as Windows.
Apparently there's no way to get Bing to translate part of a page. So i copied it and tried to get Bing to translate it in notepad, in an e-mail and in a post all by it self in Asterisk*. Somewhere along the line, i forget where, Bing actually said it translated 100%, but i couldn't find anything.
Obviously i cannot put my feelings of the experience of the whole thing into words and post them here.
So that's why i asked starstruck what Les nuits des 'étoiles!!, meant.
Blankety-blank computers,good for almost nothing except target practise!

bystander · Post by **bystander** » Tue Jan 17, 2012 7:00 pm

http://www.microsofttranslator.com/

Beyond · Post by **Beyond** » Tue Jan 17, 2012 8:31 pm

bystander wrote:http://www.microsofttranslator.com/

Well i'll be, spirally inclined by Microsoft "again"! The Bing translator you linked to, is a bit different from mine thats built in. The one you linked to, has a -translation- button, so you can paste a text and click translate. My built-in Bing translator, on the other hand, does NOT have the translator button to click. It's set up just a bit differently. I've just discovered that if i click on the blue translation arrow, it reverses the translating. So if the page is mostly english, the auto-detect won't do anything. But if i click the blue arrow to 'swap' the direction of translation, then the english becomes what ever the other language is, and the other language becomes english! Why the he-double hockey sticks they have too ways of doing it for, i don't know. Now all i have to do is remember it

Thanks bystander. Couldn't have figured it out with out you! Frizenfrackincomputerstuff!

TNT · Post by **TNT** » Wed Jan 18, 2012 12:07 am

An airplane flying below the Pleiades. Also the Praesepe at two in the morn.

Ann · Post by **Ann** » Wed Jan 18, 2012 3:33 am

I once tried to translate an article about Eta Carina from German to English. (Translating into Swedish seemed out of the question - this was several years ago - but English would do fine, of course.)

Guess what I got? The nebula around Eta Carina was called "fog". But worse, Eta Carina itself was called an "asterisk"!!!!! *****

Twinkle, twinkle, little asterisk, eh?

Ann

orin stepanek · Post by **orin stepanek** » Thu Jan 19, 2012 1:01 pm

Darkness due to overcast skies! It's supposed to snow and I hope it don't!

starstruck · Post by **starstruck** » Mon Jan 23, 2012 7:32 am

I opened the front door at about 6:45 this morning, stepped outside, and there before me, almost directly south, there were two pinpoints of light still showing in the early dawn sky just above the treetops. Thought it might be worth a shot, so I grabbed my only scope (it's a nature spotting scope, not a celestial one) and aimed it at the slightly brighter of the two, a little higher and to the left. What a delight! Once I got zoomed in and the focus spot-on, I could clearly see one of the most beautiful sights to behold . . Saturn and it's rings . . just hanging there outside my front door. Simply breathtaking!

Swinging around more towards the west, and at a higher angle in the sky, the equally bright but somewhat less dramatic view of Mars too!
Two planets for a Monday morning. Not bad!

Beyond · Post by **Beyond** » Mon Jan 23, 2012 2:43 pm

starstruck wrote:I opened the front door at about 6:45 this morning, stepped outside, and there before me, almost directly south, there were two pinpoints of light still showing in the early dawn sky just above the treetops. Thought it might be worth a shot, so I grabbed my only scope (it's a nature spotting scope, not a celestial one) and aimed it at the slightly brighter of the two, a little higher and to the left. What a delight! Once I got zoomed in and the focus spot-on, I could clearly see one of the most beautiful sights to behold . . Saturn and it's rings . . just hanging there outside my front door. Simply breathtaking!

Swinging around more towards the west, and at a higher angle in the sky, the equally bright but somewhat less dramatic view of Mars too!
Two planets for a Monday morning. Not bad!

Saturn? Just hanging outside your front door?? Be careful that you don't fall into the hexagonal hole! We don't know what's down there!! You would then have to change "starstruck" to 'planet struck', and you might just get a bad case of gas

neufer · Post by **neufer** » Mon Jan 23, 2012 3:19 pm

Beyond wrote:
starstruck wrote:
I opened the front door at about 6:45 this morning, stepped outside, and there before me, almost directly south... I could clearly see one of the most beautiful sights to behold . . . Saturn . . . just hanging there outside my front door. Simply breathtaking!!

Saturn? Just hanging outside your front door??

http://www.deardeath.com/the_grim_reaper.htm wrote:
.
[b][color=#0000FF]Saturn castrates his father Uranus, the Greek sky god (before Zeus) Giorgio Vasari: _The Mutilation of Uranus by Saturn (Cronus)_[/color][/b]
<<In Greek mythology, Chronos (Cronus) was the king of titans and the father of Zeus. He was also a harvest god called Father Time and carried a sickle which is a tool used in harvesting grain. The Grim Reaper carrying a scythe are directly derived from Cronus. The myth of Chronos eating his children was used in a poetic sense for time devouring all things, as in the old saying "nothing lasts forever." The three Greek words that were either related originally or related through confusion later were: Chronus (meaning "time"), Cronus (the god of harvest before the Greek gods took over), and corone (meaning "crow"). Little wonder then that we often see a crow accompanying the Grim Reaper.>>

Ann · Post by **Ann** » Mon Jan 23, 2012 4:18 pm

neufer wrote:
Beyond wrote:
starstruck wrote:
I opened the front door at about 6:45 this morning, stepped outside, and there before me, almost directly south... I could clearly see one of the most beautiful sights to behold . . . Saturn . . . just hanging there outside my front door. Simply breathtaking!!

Saturn? Just hanging outside your front door??

Well, Saturn hung just outside my balcony this morning, accompanied by Spica. It must be paying Starstruck and me a visit (accompanied by Spica)!

Mars also hung outside my balcony, although admittedly higher in the sky. It was really quite bright, and, dare it say it, red! Or, at the very least, rust-colored. Yup, that's Mars for you.

(The picture, by the way, shows a deep fried Mars bar, properly rust-colored! Yummm!)

Ann

starstruck · Post by **starstruck** » Mon Jan 23, 2012 4:43 pm

Hey Ann!, yes Mars definitely had a visible reddish tinge, even to the unaided eye, but through my field scope it was really just a slightly bigger reddish blob, I couldn't make out any detail. Unlike Saturn, which was a truly magical sight. And it was indeed accompanied by Spica, almost, but not quite, as bright in the sky 'alongside'. Glad you saw it too.

I have to say, it was a much more euphoric experience than reading Neufer's rather 'grim' mutilatory post . . such a happy thought for a Monday.

Beyond, hehe!, you may be right, I have been somewhat 'planet struck' today, and I'm so glad you picked up on my use of the word 'hanging', cos now it gives me the perfect excuse to link to this . .
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=si2kis6lWRg

Beyond · Post by **Beyond** » Mon Jan 23, 2012 7:20 pm

starstruck wrote:Hey Ann!, yes Mars definitely had a visible reddish tinge, even to the unaided eye, but through my field scope it was really just a slightly bigger reddish blob, I couldn't make out any detail. Unlike Saturn, which was a truly magical sight. And it was indeed accompanied by Spica, almost, but not quite, as bright in the sky 'alongside'. Glad you saw it too.

I have to say, it was a much more euphoric experience than reading Neufer's rather 'grim' mutilatory post . . such a happy thought for a Monday.

Beyond, hehe!, you may be right, I have been somewhat 'planet struck' today, and I'm so glad you picked up on my use of the word 'hanging', cos now it gives me the perfect excuse to link to this . .
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=si2kis6lWRg

I've never heard of the Stranglers before. They seem to be a bit of alright. And i don't even feel like a wog after listening to them.

I have noticed another danger to stay away from besides the 'hole' in saturn though.
Ann's deep-fried mars bars. WHO, on earth, would ever want to deep-fry a mars bar

Maybe that's how one becomes a 'wog'

bystander · Post by **bystander** » Mon Jan 23, 2012 7:37 pm

Beyond wrote:Ann's deep-fried mars bars. WHO, on earth, would ever want to deep-fry a mars bar

They'll fry any thing! I used to get this at a local restaurant (since defunct).

: [size=200][b][i]Deep Fried Ice Cream[/i][/b][/size]

They even have recipes for it.

Ann · Post by **Ann** » Wed Jan 25, 2012 3:45 am

Like Beyond, I had never heard of the Stranglers. Well, they are just hanging around, like Saturn and Mars!

Bystander, that deep fried ice cream looks rather good. A lot better than the deep fried Mars bar, that's for sure.

But to return to the subject of what I saw in the sky tonight, I didn't see an aurora (see my post to Chris in this forum). But earlier in the evening, some time after sunset, I saw a delicate thin sliver of a young Moon hanging silvery against the blue evening sky. This isn't my picture, but the Moon looked something like this.

I guess it was just hanging around.

Ann

Ann · Post by **Ann** » Wed Jan 25, 2012 5:49 pm

I saw a lovely sort-of-conjunction between Venus and the crescent Moon tonight (they were still so far apart that it was only a semi-conjunction).

Still, it was very pretty. The Moon was lovely and Earth-shiny. I could see mountains along the terminator.

It was a very pretty sight!

Ann

orin stepanek · Post by **orin stepanek** » Thu Jan 26, 2012 8:45 pm

bystander wrote:
Beyond wrote:Ann's deep-fried mars bars. WHO, on earth, would ever want to deep-fry a mars bar
They'll fry any thing! I used to get this at a local restaurant (since defunct).

[size=200][b][i]Deep Fried Ice Cream[/i][/b][/size]
They even have recipes for it.

We have a cantina in town that serves fried icecream! MMMMMMM!!!

With beer if you want!

BMAONE23 · Post by **BMAONE23** » Thu Jan 26, 2012 10:11 pm

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

By the light of the slivery moon

xpandingspace · Post by **xpandingspace** » Sat Jan 28, 2012 5:38 am

A bright and beautiful pass of the ISS last night at 21:26 UTC+2.
Rising from the SW at 10deg and disapearing into the terminator overhead @ mag. -3.6.
Looked like a fast moving, miniature Venus..
Predictions at: http://www.heavens-above.com

Starship Asterisk*

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