June 28, 2015
As I walked down to the Pub this evening, I was astounded to see, in twilight, two bright “stars” and, I think a third one in a line to the upper left. (I can just see it if I use the trick of looking slightly to the side of the object so that it is imaged by the intensity sensitive rod cells in the retina.)
Pulling up Pocket Universe on my iPhone and aiming it at the the two bright stars shows:
(The top center labeled object is an annotation – everything else is the sky. pUniverse tells me that brightness are Venus: -5.3 magnitude, Jupiter: -1.8, and Regulus: +1.35)
(Steve L. comments on my Facebook post: “On June 30th, the angular distance between Jupiter and Venus will be the smallest in about 2000 years. They will look almost like one. It’s not to be missed.“)
An an aside, the celestial magnitude system has the brightest objects with negative values (sun is -25) and the dim objects positive (+6 is about the limit of human vision).
Lightening up the image and labeling the objects gives:
The iPhone 6 camera is at or better sensitivity to color images than my eye, but not as sensitive as using the rods in my eye to image: I am pretty sure that I can see the faint object about half way between Jupiter and Regulus, but it does not show up distinctly in the enhanced iPhone image. (By the way, the enhancing, cropping, and labeling were all done on my iPhone using my favorite image program (after trying half a dozen others): Photogene.)
Western Marches 