by Bill Arnett
At 11:57 AM -0800 2/23/99, Mark Wagner wrote:
>I again found the planets just a few minutes ago by shielding my eyes and
>looking approximately 27 degrees east of the sun along an imagied
>ecleptic to where they should be located.
I just typed "Star 902; Enter; GOTO" and waited for the clouds to disappear :-)
Venus is, of course, very bright but nothing but the phase visible (I estimate about 75%....SN says 88%). Jupiter looks like a ghost of its usual self, just barely visible in my piggybacked Pronto at 70x but obvious enough in my LX200 at 125x. No Galileans were seen, nor any detail on Jupiter. But the two planets are separated by less than half the apparent field at 125x :-) (using a Vixen 8-24 zoom at 24).
I think I'll just let my LX200 track them until sunset but we are very close to the appulse right now.