Help please? Western sky in Southern Spain

[fflynn]

Hello there

I've just returned from a road trip from the UK down to Morocco. Every night there was a very bright thing, fairly low, directly West - the brightest thing in the sky through Spain and Morocco.

The person I was with confidently called it Mir, which doesn't exist anymore, does it?

I need to get the right name as I want to mention it in a piece of writing - and I've been unable to work it out via Google searches.

It's probably very well known - I just don't know it, yet.

I do hope someone can help

Thanks in advance

Fiona

[Starblazer]

Try stellarium pop in a rough area where you were at using co-ordinates from google earth and then pan the sky around, rewind the date backwards and you should be able to spot and find out there

Could well have been Venus

[yeti monster]

My guess would be Venus.

Mir fell out of the sky and burned up in a previous century.

[Naz]

Over the latter weeks of the summer, Venus has been in the west in the evening sky and getting closer to the Sun. Very bright, there is no mistaking it.

[LukeSkywatcher]

Venus for sure.

[ollypenrice]

Agreed.

Olly

[fflynn]

Thanks, good people. Stellarium is a cracking bit of software, but a bit fiddly to the the uninitiated like me and it keeps crashing on my old Mac. What I found when I tried a few different sets of co-ordinates is a star called Vega. Maybe I'm typing in the co-ords the wrong way?

I know Mir is long gone, but the person I was with, who's a driver who uses this route all the time, said it's always there and that he'd seen it through good binoculars and that it's a satellite.

It's just that I need to try and get this right for the piece I'm writing (I was on a project looking at modern trade routes and drove down to Maroc on an artic lorry).

This object is really very bright - I could catch it on a normal exposure on my camera. Here's a pic taken in Spain after dusk - it's the squiggle, I was in a lorry at the time.

It's co-ords are

Latitude: 40.810490° N

Longitude: 5.632161° W

Picasa Web Albums - Fiona Flynn - Grand Camion ...

thanks again for your help. I'm hoping to be at Kelling star party for one evening anyway to take a look, if I can.

Fiona

[Rui]

It's definitely Venus.

It's there in the west and impossible to miss every evening. Now it's sinking down earlier in the evening, but stil high enough to be seen very bright in a relatively dark sky (here from Portugal).

As you describe it, it couldn't be a satellite. A satellite would move relatively fast in the sky and would disappear in a minute ou two.

Even the ISS (International Space Station) doesn't get that bright and, again, it would move in 1 or 2 minutes. An Iridium flare could eventually be brighter, but the flare would just last for some tens of seconds.

[yeti monster]

Yup, only Venus squiggles like that........

[LukeSkywatcher]

I cant see Venus any longer from my observing location but a couple of weeks ago i was in the Canary Islands and it still had a good bit of height (I had a clear view to the western horizon). It took me a while to orientate myself as to which direction was which so i stupidly mistook Venus for Jupiter. I should have thought about it logically and known that Venus appears at sunset. Jupiter follows on later from the east.

[fflynn]

Venus it is then. Thanks again, everyone.

Fiona