On Mar 31, 3:53*pm, Sam Wormley wrote:
Venus (And Mercury ) in Western Sky this week...

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2...nets.htm?list1...

I simply don't understand how anybody ever noticed Mercury before
photography was invented.

I live on the west coast of Oregon, less than a mile from the ocean,
so looking west is looking into some of the cleanest air on the planet
--- it has to be MUCH cleaner than the atmosphere back when everybody
used wood fires for cooking and heating. I knew exactly where to look
--- all the diagrams on the net, plus my Stellarium program, show it
at about 4 o'clock from Venus, just a couple degrees away. The sky in
the west was cloudless, for a change --- Venus was brilliant.I had 8-
power binoculars. And I still couldn't find Mercury.

How in the world could the ancient Greeks have ever noticed it?