Peter has been using the free version of Night Sky app for years. Recently, the app has upgraded itself with amazing graphics to depict the planets in a sensational way. The out of scale rendition of planets gives a falseness that is helpful and yet unhelpful for understanding their real size in space. For example if a normal book's punctuation 'period' (sentence full stop) is the size of our own sun, then Pluto will be the furthest out, a metre way from this dot, and our closest star 7.24 Km (4.5 miles) away, then just imagine the size of these planets in all that! Those kinds of scale imagination is staggering! Maybe Peter can turn off this graphicly enhanced layer but he is still to figure that one out. Melbourne has had overcast nights this past week and so this app was the only way he could view the very rare alignment of Jupiter and Saturn. The result is a few 'captures' of these planets over the days starting from 21 December 2020 when they were supposed to become 'one superstar' viewed from Earth. One could spend days even weeks discovering new things on Night Sky and probably still not scratch the surface, especially for owners of Night Sky Premium.
An illustrator's perception? but maybe a very good telescope could get close to this.
At the same time Mars and Uranus are in fairly close alignment.
Seeing Pluto so large near by Saturn and Jupiter is nonetheless disconcerting.
Peter zoomed in and snapped Jupiter and Saturn six days later when the sky had cleared, near the Western horizon, and they were just a pinkie finger apart.
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