Use Orion to see Mercury

Mercury is an elusive planet. It is small, dim and most of the time to close to the sun to be seen at all. Yet , during its greatest elongation it is far enough from the Sun. In this period Mercury can is easy to spot after sunset or before sunrise.. Today 18-Apr-2016 Mercury is in greatest western elongation meaning it is easy to watch.

It is even easier as you can use the famous constellation Orion to help you find Mercury. Just continue the straight line from Orion's belt and go almost to the horizon and you will see Mercury. Actually Mercury is brighter than any of Orion's belt stars so you might be able to see it even before. Start watching about 45 minutes after sunset and look about 15 degrees up from the place the sun set. There is no other bright star in this area so when you finally see the white dot, it is mercury. And if you own a telescope try to observe Mercury and see its tiny but noticeable phase.

Here are some photos I took tonight to guide you

The first one is without annotations:

Orion and Mercury

And here are annotations. Do not confuse the airplane with Mercury.

 And if we mentioned an airplane here are some more airplanes (Looks like the IAF is practicing for Independence day)

And a bird on the background of the moon (From 17-Apr-2016)

Hazy Sunset

Astronomers don't like haze. It is bad. But even haze has it benefits and sometimes you can clearly see the sun through the haze without the need of filters which are otherwise a must. During sunset and the right amount of haze you might even be able to see sunspots with the naked eye as was the case today with sunspot AR2529. Also the swallows in the sky flew beyond it to create interesting photos And a nice video to start with

But let's o back to the beginning. Here is a general photo of the sun. The haze makes the skies brown and yellow, quite eek, and the sun itself much dimmer than it should be.

The sun in the haze

More zoom toward the sun but the exposure is wrong. However the small flock of birds make this photo special and the sunspot can be seen,.

The sun and birds

A proper exposure will show some details of the sunspot and the birds are over the sun.

Sunspot and birds

The dark region of sunspot AR2529 is 20,000KM in diameter

Sunspot AR2529

The power cords also gives an interesting photo

The sun and power-cords

Few minutes later the haze is so bad that the sun fades long before actual sunset.

Hazy sun

And the new moon for dessert.

The new moon 10-Apr-2016

Carnival of Space #452

Hello and welcome to Carnival of Space #452. I hoped to report about seeing Venus occultation today but the weather was not good , the skies were cloudy and hazy so I was not able to see it myself. Lets go straight to this week articles.

From Planetria: Pluto once had rivers and lakes of liquid nitrogen, New Horizons data suggests

From Examiner.com: Blue Origin launches and lands the New Shepard for a third time

From Chandra: Trigger for Milky Way's Youngest Supernova Identified

From LPI: The April edition of the LPI Earth and Space Science newsletter for educators is up.

From ADSABS: ADS Enhanced was a great April Fools Day site from the NASA Astrophysical Data Service. ADS Dating (sort potential mates...by citation!)

From Planetry.org: LPSC 2016: So. Much. Ceres.

From Ryan Marciniak: The Essence of Science and the Friges of Reality. How probability and rare occurrences shape scientific theories and allow us to push them to the limit. An Oxygen rich White Dwarf star proves the point.

From Universe Today: Opportunity Discovers Dust Devil, Explores Steepest Slopes on Mars ALMA Captures Never-Before-Seen Details of Protoplanetary Disk

That's All! Happy week and clear skies!