Saturday, March 7, 2015

day and night, with 2 special sky surprises

yesterday brought 2 sky suprises:



Circumhorizontal Arc
In the afternoon, looking up, i saw a hazy rainbow-coloured patch in the sky. it wasn't large, and didn't last long, but it's a special sky effect that i've seen once before, in a larger and brighter shape: a Circumhorizontal Arc (here's my first encounter with that effect, when i had no clue what i was looking at: cloud halo)

And later, in the evening, a bright "star" appeared in the sky:

 

Venus + Uranus + Mars
From the brightness, it was easy to guess that the star actually is a planet. But which one? The sky map app had the answer, which came with a surprise: 3 planets were joining in that spot at that hour: Venus and Uranus and Mars.

Back home, I looked for a website with more information about it, and found it at Astronomie.info: they have a night schedule with visibility of planets and the moon along a timeline. I marked the constellation we saw with a yellow spot:



So interesting and fascinating, to catch those sky phenomenons.

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Links: 
For more sky moments in this blog, try this link: sky diary
And for more skies from around the world, visit skywatch friday


1 comment:

Spare Parts and Pics said...

I always see the bright stars which I assume are planets... need to get an app to figure out which ones they are! Nice post.