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A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Jupiter-Venus angular separation
From: Frank Reed
Date: 2022 Apr 30, 18:06 -0700
From: Frank Reed
Date: 2022 Apr 30, 18:06 -0700
Find the time of sunrise at your location tomorrow morning. Step outside 45 minutes before. Look nearly due east, low in the sky, less than 10° high in mid-northern latitudes. You'll see brilliant Venus and Jupiter separated by a fraction of a degree. Can you measure the separation with your sextant? Or if you've attened one of my workshops in the past five years or so, can you estimate the separation with a "paper sextant"? If you have a large enough scope on your sextant, can you determine the orientation of the ecliptic relative to the planets? What else lies nearly along the ecliptic besides the Sun and major planets?
Frank Reed
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