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Ain't Venus: Anomaly In February 2017

Micalrin:

What constituted your westward horizon? Were you close enough to the coast to be viewing the sea, or were you inland with land as your horizon?
 
so with the available data and online resources etc are we able to even give a verdict not venus versus venus ?
 
so with the available data and online resources etc are we able to even give a verdict not venus versus venus ?

Nope ... The last response after I posted the sky map for that time and place seemed to indicate the reported object was (or may have been) something other than the closely grouped Mars and Venus.
 
can you explain how the sky map is used, for the folks at home
 
can you explain how the sky map is used, for the folks at home

Imagine, if you will, that you are at a particular location in the northern hemisphere, on a particular date and at a particular time ...

Step outside and face due south.

Now look straight upward at the zenith. The center point of the star map is the zenith.

The star map illustrates everything you can see unaided, in this canonical orientation, from the zenith down to the entire surrounding (idealized; possible) horizon in all directions.

YAATAHMV (Your actual atmospheric transparency and horizons may vary ... )
 
ah okay, and its generated from a set of co ordinates and or gps ?
 
ah okay, and its generated from a set of co ordinates and or gps ?

It depends on the source. Some offer generic sky maps based on different levels of time granularity (days; weeks; months), and such generic maps are based on one or another generic location.

Unfortunately, I don't recall which of multiple sites I used to generate the sky map I posted earlier.

As noted on the map itself, I was allowed to specify a geographical location by city and state. As I recall, I was allowed to specify time at that specific location with a temporal granularity of one hour (e.g., 1900 versus 2000).

I don't doubt there are more sophisticated (but perhaps not public nor free) services allowing location specification using geo-coordinates and perhaps even more fine-grained temporal specification.

I don't know whether there's an app or service that can dynamically produce a star map based on your real time GPS reading, but I suspect there is such a capability out there somewhere. Again - I don't know whether this more sophisticated service would be public or free.
 
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