4:45

Venus high in the south near sunset. Orion visible in the west around 6pm, strange because it was fairly light out, the nearly full moon was high and I was sitting at a stoplight surrounded by streetlights.

Saturday, January 3rd

Despite the crazy snow in Vancouver, I managed to see some planets while on Saltspring Island. Venus was nearly overhead and Jupiter and Mars were quite close together near the horizon. I wore my sunglasses at night while we were driving to the ferry so that my nightvision stayed on. It was amusing.

Saltspring has very few streetlights and is great for astronomy.

Happy New Year!

2009 is the International Year of Astronomy. Canada is participating here and you can find your country here.

Maybe I will commemorate this with a telescope. :) Although for searching out nebulae and the Pleiades, the binocs totally rock. I won't be giving them up even when I get the telescope. (Costco dropped the price of theirs from $200 to $150...I desperately need to look up the stats on it and see if it might actually be worth buying.)