Re: [guide-user] Multiple-object conjunctions?

Paul Schlyter Jun 13, 2004

Arild Moland wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> > So why not let your Guide search for Mercury and Venus transits
> > between the years 10000 and 14000 AD, and then manually inspect these
> > lists to see if any of them happen concurrently?
>
> first, thanks to Paul for a thorough elaboration on this subject. Very
> informative indeed.
>
> And even though I could do as you suggest, ie. run through the Mercury and Venus
> transits separately and check manually, I'd rather have my computer do that :)
> That's what computers are for, after all.
>
> So my question remains, is Guide capable of doing searches for multi-object
> conjunctions? (My suspicion is that it is not.)

As Bill aid, Guide currently lacks that capability. Thus it remains to
produce transits for Mercury and for Venus, and then look for a match in the
two lists. Of course it's nicer to have the computer do that, thus one can
write a small utility which reads the two lists and outputs any matches
present there.

> As for what a Mercury/Venus transit would look like, another guy from Norway
> has made a faked simulation:
>
> http://home.online.no/~tundlie/venus-merkur-passasje.swf

A nice simulation -- and not just a double transit but also Venus occulting
Mercury during transit - this would indeed be an extremely rare event! However
that simulation is unrealistic in one respect: it suggests the orbits of Mercury
and Venus are co-planar, while in reality they are inclined to one another by
some 4 degrees.

> Best regards,
>
> Arild :)
>
> ---------------------------------
> http://www.astro.uio.no/~arildmi/Scopes/
> http://astralscooter.com/MyGallery/
> http://astralscooter.com/nasmail/
> http://www.astro.uio.no/nas/
> arildmi@...


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