It's Snowing

[shadegate]

Is Saturn naked eye visible at all or does it need a scope? I'm not expecting to see rings but wondered if the main body is viewable.
Don't have a scope but have recently enjoyed seeing Venus, Mars and Jupiter

[Parus Ater]

Oh yes, with the naked eye you can see Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. Without a bit of mag they all look like stars but they are larger from our viewpoint so they don't twinkle as easily. You can see the moons of Saturn and Jupiter with a bog standard pair of binoculars, which is awesome.

If anyone's interested in this sort of thing you can download a porgramme called Stellarium which shows where everything is in realtime and you can zoom around and look at whatever. Perfect for those "what the frack is that?!" moments. http://www.stellarium.org/
On all OS's as well.

[pbeccas]

Your lucky Al, I have never seen snow in my life - 41 years. The closest I get is the ice in the freezer.

[grant]

Your lucky Al, I have never seen snow in my life - 41 years. The closest I get is the ice in the freezer.

My first year of university, there was a Sheila up from Down Under ( ) at my residence and she lost her mind with joy at the first snow. I was all, like, it's snow. And there's 6 more cold, crappy months of it.

[Big Al]

Your lucky Al, I have never seen snow in my life - 41 years. The closest I get is the ice in the freezer.

It really isn't all it's cracked up to be!

[Stuart]

Same on this side of Scotland, really hot on thursday, cold friday and not too bad today, and yes really big moon a pain unless you want to look at a really big moon and far too bright, although Venus was good at around 21:00 last night!

Aye, it was cracking. During that week of lovely weather the other month I managed to get this of Venus in the middle of the afternoon...


I'm a bit miffes about Saturn this year, it looks like it's going to be too low for me to see from my garden all year and since I don't have a car I can't go anywhere else to see it

Brilliant pic Parus, seeing other objects in our solar system and DSO for the first time is as exciting as opening a box of goodies from WG! And I've only seen Saturn once this year Seen more snow than I wanted to see though, but no-where near as much as Grant!

[Parus Ater]

Cheers, Stuart. My favourite to look at is Jupiter, it doesn't have the visual punch of Saturn but the fact you can easily see that it's a moving object is exciting.