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APOD: Mercury and Venus Over Paris (2010 Apr 12)
Posted: Mon Apr 12, 2010 3:52 am
by APOD Robot
Mercury and Venus Over Paris
Explanation: Go outside tonight and see one of the more interesting
planetary conjunctions of recent years. Just after
sunset, the planets
Mercury and
Venus are visible quite near each other. Now Venus, being commonly
discernible as one of the brightest objects in the sky, is frequently mistaken for an airplane. (Venus will set quite slowly, though.)
Mercury, however, is dimmer and usually harder to find. Recently, though, Mercury can be
found just to the right of Venus,
appearing increasingly below the
brighter planet over the next week. Pictured above,
Venus and Mercury were imaged next to the famous
Notre Dame Cathedral in
Paris,
France. ?A careful inspection of the image will further reveal that the bright object nearly below Venus is iconic
Eiffel Tower.
[/b]
Re: APOD: Mercury and Venus Over Paris (2010 Apr 12)
Posted: Mon Apr 12, 2010 4:34 am
by neufer
![Image](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/6f/Victor_Hugo-Hunchback.jpg/200px-Victor_Hugo-Hunchback.jpg)
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Hunchback_of_Notre_Dame wrote:
<<A few years ago, while visiting or, rather, rummaging about Notre-Dame, the author of this book found, in an obscure nook of one of the towers, the following word, engraved by hand upon the wall:—
[list] ἈNΆГKH[/list]These Greek capitals, black with age, and quite deeply graven in the stone, with I know not what signs peculiar to Gothic caligraphy imprinted upon their forms and upon their attitudes, as though with the purpose of revealing that it had been a hand of the Middle Ages which had inscribed them there, and especially the fatal and melancholy meaning contained in them, struck the author deeply.
He questioned himself; he sought to divine who could have been that soul in torment which had not been willing to quit this world without leaving this stigma of crime or unhappiness upon the brow of the ancient church.
Afterwards, the wall was whitewashed or scraped down, I know not which, and the inscription disappeared. For it is thus that people have been in the habit of proceeding with the marvellous churches of the Middle Ages for the last two hundred years. Mutilations come to them from every quarter, from within as well as from without. The priest whitewashes them, the archdeacon scrapes them down; then the populace arrives and demolishes them.
Thus, with the exception of the fragile memory which the author of this book here consecrates to it, there remains to-day nothing whatever of the mysterious word engraved within the gloomy tower of Notre-Dame,—nothing of the destiny which it so sadly summed up. The man who wrote that word upon the wall disappeared from the midst of the generations of man many centuries ago; the word, in its turn, has been effaced from the wall of the church; the church will, perhaps, itself soon disappear from the face of the earth.
It is upon this word that this book is founded.>>
Re: APOD: Mercury and Venus Over Paris (2010 Apr 12)
Posted: Mon Apr 12, 2010 2:35 pm
by biddie67
People just don't build buildings like they used to - thank goodness the universe has its own independent architects.
Re: APOD: Mercury and Venus Over Paris (2010 Apr 12)
Posted: Mon Apr 12, 2010 3:02 pm
by neufer
biddie67 wrote:People just don't build buildings like they used to - thank goodness the universe has its own independent architects.
![Image](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4d/God_the_Geometer.jpg)
Re: APOD: Mercury and Venus Over Paris (2010 Apr 12)
Posted: Tue Apr 13, 2010 12:22 pm
by cormac.odonohoe@tcd.ie
The pictures aren't being received when I go to the APOD site. There are the usual descriptions etc, but no picture.
Has something changed?
Kind regards,
Dr. Cormac O'Donohoe
Trinity College Dublin