Celestial viewings

We bought a telescope for Christmas a couple years back, but we're generally not too good about using it. The past few nights, we've noticed what appears to be a really bright star in the west sky after sunset. It's actually Venus. And just to the right of Venus is Saturn. We pulled the scope out to get a closer look. It's cool to see Saturn's rings. Then, if you turn left from those beauties, you can see Jupiter. With our scope, we can see the moons and the Red Spot. There's another "something" a little right and down from Jupiter that flickers red and blue. We thought it might be Mars, but the little machine that hooks up to the telescope informed us that Mars is below the horizon. I did a quick Google search and found a cool site which informs me that the Mars-like object is actually Antares.

While I'm on the subject of astronomy, I thought I'd share this, just in case you haven't seen it 42 times already in e-mail forwards. Somehow, Marc hadn't seen it, so I guess it's possible that there are others on this planet who haven't either.

*We didn't take that picture. Heh!