NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Frank Reed
Date: 2017 Mar 20, 16:58 -0700
I saw Mercury tonight, no problem. It was obvious with no optical aid by 7:23 pm EDT which is about 25 minutes after nominal sunset and a couple of minutes before the end of civil twilight. Venus is fading fast and will disappear from the evening sky in just a few days. To find Mercury, I recommend the "Sky Map" app for Android and iOS. Just aim it west after sunset, and it will show you exactly where to look. Positions are changing daily.
And don't forget, with a little coercion, you can convince the USNO celestial navigation web app to provide the usual data on Mercury. Go here:
http://fer3.com/arc/USNO-data-NavList.html
and enter "mer" for celestial body. Don't forget to set today's date and the correct UT and location. You'll get the usual GHA, Dec, etc. for Mercury. You can also have some fun by trying out numbers for the body name. For example, enter 120 and see what you get.
Frank Reed
