I got
NASA - Sunset Planet Alert message the other day, and have been watching for Mercury. I have watched the stars all of my life, and have seen all of the naked eye planets before - except for Mercury. Mercury is tough to find for an urban guy like me - low and dim means invisible in the city unless you have a good marker. There is no better marker than Venus!
So Kim and I headed up Royal York, and stood on the overpass over the Gardner, where I knew we would get a good view to the West-North-West, and we waited.
Once it started to get dark, maybe 20 minutes after sunset, we saw Venus appear. That is always easy to find in a city sky. The photo's do not really do it justice. As you already know if you watch this type of thing, I think you could see Venus in the night sky from the middle of the new strip in Las Vegas - it is that bright.
Even though it was easy to find, I was glad to see that as per my sky map check earlier in the evening, we had good clearance above the horizon, and I was therefore very hopeful we would get Mercury as well!
So we waited awhile, and Bingo! Mercury popped out of the haze!
We were very pleased. Lots more photos in the album - click below and enjoy. No doubt lots of better photos out there - but hey - we had fun.
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