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May 13, 2011, at around 4:55 AM...road towards Marco Polo.

Clockwise from topleft, Jupiter, Venus and Mercury. Mars is off-frame, extreme lower right. If I only woke up earlier, I could have asked the motorcycle-for-hire driver to find a better spot beyond Marco Polo, so that I could have included Mars in the shot. But as they say, celestial events don't wait for anyone, so I took my shots, and that was that.


Closer view.


Shots taken with a Canon PowerShot S3IS (not a DSLR).

Same view in Stellarium:



It's a pity that a low pressure area was over Cebu a few days ago--the planets were closer to each other on May 11th.

This gathering doesn't mean that the planets are really close to each other--they are only close to each other from the vantage point of earth...in reality, they are NOT close to each other. To illustrate this...

...let's go out of the earth and view the planets involved from a distance.


As you can see, if we draw a dashed green line from the earth, the line-of-sight we create passes through all the four planets, even though they are not really that close to each other...viewed again from a vantage point closer to the earth, this is how it looks...


So, what does this mean? It means that conjunctions do not spell the end of the world or such preposterous claims--they are only pretty and insightful events to look at, if you know where to look, and you know what you're looking at :

My best guess is, if you were not informed about this event in advance, and you saw this event yourself on the morning of May 13, you would think "What are those four bright stars I see out of the window, they look neat!" and you'd never know what it was...well, 'til now, that is

-RODION