The Moon, Jupiter and Venus tonight converged in a wonderfully clear sky. Grabbing my camera I snapped a couple of pictures which do little justice to this wonderfully serene view. The light pollution from Brighton did a good job of blocking out much of the rest of the sky leaving an extremely clear view of this conjunction. Seeing three close stellar objects in a small window of the sky makes you really wonder about the skies on other planets. Just imagine the spectacular vistas there must be on the surface of far flung systems. Especially the more  active systems or highly compacted clusters and galaxies.

Our skies are pretty tame on the whole with stellar events of significance few and far between. This event even though insignificant held me in fascination; its a shame that only in my imagination could I conceive the jaw dropping and totally overwhelming vistas that must exist throughout the universe.

You can find some lovely images here.

Comet Holmes was a pretty understated but important example of how we are surrounded by a huge variety of stellar objects. Expanding to become the largest object in our solar system whatever happened to this comet must have been pretty dramatic.

Knowing that Comet Holmes was visible to the naked eye myself and some friends decided to go out on the Downs to do some star gazing. We found a great spot in a car park near Devils Dyke and started setting up. A couple of dubious cars were already lurking and we guessed this must be a dogging spot. When two women and three men got out of the car, the lonely sexual desperados must have thought their luck was in. As I got out my tripod they must have really got excited at the kinky potential of what we could all be doing. Unfortunately this must have been shattered when I setup my astronomical binoculars; and tea, biscuits and a hip flask of lovely whisky were passed around.

One of the doggers immediately left in obvious disgust, then after about ten minutes the final car departed but what was truly astonishing was that as the last car past us a bloke leaned out and shouted “GET A LIFE”. After an ironic chuckle, we continued to waste our lives looking at the infinite wonders of the Universe rather than participating in the fulfilling act of sticking our cocks through car windows.