What's that planet?

[bastette_joyce]

Every night for the past week, I've seen a large "star" in the sky that seems too big and too bright to be a real star. So I'm figuring it's a planet, but which one is it? It's more yellowish than the other stars, but not exactly reddish, so my thought is it's probably not Mars

Comments

[ex_serenejo]

I'm thinking (from looking at my favorite night-sky reference) that it's probably Jupiter.

[bastette_joyce]

Hmm. I read a bit on that site and it says that Jupiter is mostly visible in the early morning. But I've been seeing it in the early to late evening.

I'm thinking it might be Saturn. The site says that it's visible in the evening, and has a yellowish appearance. That sounds a lot more like what I'm seeing.

Thanks for the reference! I think my search hit that site, but I passed it up for some others that seemed more promising. Guess I was wrong about that.

[wild_irises]

We've been seeing it a lot in Portland. abostick59, who is a pretty good semi-trained astronomer, thinks it's Venus.

[bastette_joyce]

I didn't realize that Venus would appear so high in the sky - somehow I thought it was only visible on the horizon.

(The other night, however, someone told me that Venus can appear at 60 degrees above the horizon, which is a good part of the way to straight up. :))