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In just a few days, Jupiter, Mercury and Venus will come together in the night sky in what is known as the “Dance of the Planets”.

Triple planetary conjunctions are relatively rare in the night sky, but astronomers are about to be in for a real treat. The three brightest planets in our solar system as seen from Earth — Jupiter, Mercury and Venus — will be coming together in the sky, “dancing” around each other over the course of several nights, starting 24 May.

If we’re lucky, we see a triple conjunction once every two years or so. The most recent was in May 2011; the next won’t be until October 2015.

According to the Sydney Observatory, the best time to watch is at twilight, when the planets will appear in thenorth west west (PDF).Because the planets in this conjunction are so bright, the dance will be visible to the naked eye, even in densely populated areas — although, if you have access to a telescope or binoculars, so much the better.

The planets will be at their closest, with Jupiter and Venus just 1 degree apart, on 28 and 29 May. All three planets will form a straight line on 31 May as they gradually move apart from each other.

via Watch the planets dance in a triple conjunction – Crave.

Though he never actually crossed it, the Greek mathematician Pythagoras is sometimes credited with having first conceived of the Equator, calculating its location on the Earth’s sphere more than four centuries before the birth of Christ. Aristotle, who never stepped over it either and knew nothing about the landscape surrounding it, pictured the equatorial region as a land so hot that no one could survive there: the ‘Torrid Zone’.Medieval Christian mapmakers, familiar only with a small corner of the planet, worked within strict horizons that were fixed by the Church’s interpretation of the Bible. Their Earth was flat. First created in the 7th century, the Christian orbis terrarum circle of the Earth maps, known for visual reasons as ‘T-and-O’ maps, included only the northern hemisphere.This medieval argument was still rumbling on when Columbus first sailed southwest from Spain to the ‘Indies’ in 1492. Columbus, who had seen sub-Saharans in Portuguese ports in west Africa, disagreed with the Church: he claimed that the Torrid Zone was ‘not uninhabitable’. Columbus’s eventual ‘discovery’ of America stretched the horizons of the European mind. The Equator was gradually reimagined: no longer the extreme limit of humanity, a geographical hell on Earth, it became simply the middle of the Earth.

via Middle Earth: Why We Need to Turn Our Map on Its Side.

We first saw a prototype of Scout, the tricorder and companion app built by Scanadu for the Tricorder X-prize competition late last year. Today, the company is unveiling Scouts final version and launching an Indiegogo campaign to let folks order Scout and sign up to participate in a usability study — which will provide Scanadu the user feedback needed to help its tricorder get certified by the FDA. In the six months since Scout was first revealed, the design has changed somewhat, and we checked in with company CEO Walter De Brouwer to get the lowdown on the new version.

via Scanadu finalizes Scout tricorder design, wants user feedback to help it get FDA approval.

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