furrysocks2

And I've redone Mars in the same way: [Edit: in an effort to verify my own work, see https://www.uapress.arizona.edu/onlinebks/MARS/APPENDS.HTM: The dates line up pretty well and looking at my raw data, I'm within an arc-second of apparent angular size - the distance to Mars over the next few oppositions is increasing. Credit: https://in-the-sky.org/solarsystem.php]

Here's Jupiter from Greenwich... note that the error bars indicating size are scaled so that 0 represents minimum size, ie they're exaggerated. "Transit" means meridian transit, and sunset to sunrise remains optimistic - the troughs show conjunction.

oops, removed - see new thread here

I'll pop a thread up later on when I've more time. I got the calcs running on an Arduino, that was fun. It's a library implementation of a book. http://www.naughter.com/aa.html

Thanks, folks - glad it's useful, for me too. The reason I started doing calcs was mainly for fun, but hoped I could do some sort of forecasting like this. Tweaking the software is easy Code looks something like this, for anyone interested: const auto now = chrono::system_clock::now(); for (chrono::system_clock::time_point t = now; t < now+(5*365*24h); t+=7*24h) { const auto mars_dia = CAAPhysicalMars::Calculate(aa_date(t).Julian(), false).d; std::cout << get_max_and_transit_alt<Mars>(LOCATION, t) << "," << mars_dia << "," << get_max_and_transit_alt<Jupiter>(LOCATION, t) << ",," << get_max_and_transit_alt<Saturn>(LOCATION, t) << ",," << get_max_and_transit_alt<Uranus>(LOCATION, t) << ",," << get_max_and_transit_alt<Neptune>(LOCATION, t) << ",," << "\n"; } True.

I should perhaps stop posting random graphs on this thread, but thought it worth posting a concluding image showing the next couple of Mars oppositions and its maximum nighttime altitude from my location (56N) - meridian transits are shown and relative apparent angular diameter is shown. Note: the error bars have nothing to do with altitude, they're just there to indicate relative size - also they don't really work on a steep gradient. :/ I hope it's correct.

I think my graph and your table show the same thing though I'm a few degrees further north so altitude is a little lower. For Mars, the red trace shows meridian transit altitude when it occurs between sunset and sunrise. Currently the blue trace shows daytime transit altitude, but I could change that to show maximum nighttime altitude - the same thing when a meridian transit is visible, but more useful from an observer's point of view when transit is not visible. Ideally, I'd like to graph all of this for all planets, perhaps by scaling line thickness or colour intensity according to relative diameter, but not sure a spreadsheet will let me do that. I could perhaps use error bars, but it might get cluttered.

I started a wee project a few months ago calculating the apparent positions of the planets in C++, using a library called aaplus. I've just modified it to print me out the apparent altitudes of each planet crossing my meridian, between sunset and sunrise, every week for the next 15 years. Or at least I think that's what I did...

I had my first decent view of it last night in my 8.5" f/7.6, with a 19mm + UHC - framed beautifully, perhaps just a little wider that you saw it. Moon was bright also and I was far from dark-adapted, but could pick out edges and extensions which I'd never seen before. Good luck it. Edit: did you resolve the trapezium stars?

I hadn't appreciated some of my early attempts until now. A lunar volcanic plume captured here through a 3" lidl dob. I also get why it's unnecessary to keep EP's obsessively clean to capture detail like this.