I know, I know, it's Sirius

With Venus out of the picture for a few months, I've discovered a new twilight astronomy challenge - Sirius-spotting. I caught it yesterday with the Sun's altitude at -4 degrees (ie 4 degrees below the horizon), and tonight I've just managed to catch it with the Sun at -3.4 degrees.

I suspect there's an O(n**-x) in the relationship between the Sun's negative altitude and the chance of seeing Sirius, because I couldn't see it at all at -2 degrees, despite much scanning.

The library angel was with me today, even if the angel of free-flowing traffic wasn't. I found an original AD&D Monster Manual, Joe Orton's diaries and Point of No Return, despite the fact that I couldn't remember the latter's title, or who it was by, other than that their surname began with one of the letters H to M.

Sailing the southern celestial seas

Good clear binocular sighting of kappa Canis Majoris this evening. At 32 30 S I'm not breaking any personal bests, but it's good to know the waters south of 32 S are clear even in winter.

When I got home tonight about 5pm, I noticed the New Moon with Jupiter about 2 degrees away. I'd been expecting the Moon to be near Jupiter and Venus when it reappeared this month, and was impressed by how close it was to Jupiter.

But I was puzzled by the fact that I couldn't see Venus anywhere. I assumed it was behind a cloud or the houses, and went up to the end of the garden anyway to see how the Moon and Jupiter looked in binoculars.

Leaning against the shed I had a good look at the Moon with Earthshine, and tried to make an accurate guess at the distance to Jupiter - about 4 Moon widths or 2 degrees.

Then I inspected the craters on the lower limb of the Moon, which were in sharp relief because of the angle of the sunlight. Suddenly my attention was caught by a bright spot at about 4 o'clock on the edge of the Moon. 'Hmm, ' I thought, that'll be the side wall of a big crater catching the sunlight. Impressive.'

The spot got brighter and brighter until I was reminded of pictures of the 'diamond ring' effect during solar eclipses. And then (about 5.20pm) I realised that the Moon was actually moving clear of the spot, which of course was the missing Venus appearing from behind the Moon.

All unawares I'd been watching a lunar occultation of Venus, which I'd had no idea would be happening. One of the most beautiful and impressive astronomical sights I've seen.

I've had help many times from the library angel, but it's not so often that I'm blessed by assistance from Urania, the muse of astronomy.

After my recent trip to Great Haywood to visit locations from the Book of Lost Tales, I was interested to read this brief account of accompanying an Arthur Ransome fan on a trip to photograph the Beach End Buoy - except that apparently Ransome mixed the buoy up with another one. You'd expect him to be able to tell a port hand buoy from a starboard hand one.

I found myself glad today that I'd taken care to create a Lynx-friendly no-frames version of my old 1998 'home page'. It turns out that the Wayback Machine's crawler didn't archive my framed pages, but it faithfully followed the text-only links.

Targets that I haven't already got are becoming ever harder to find - on today's trip I had to be content with Slipback and a battered copy of Time Lord, the 90s Doctor Who RPG by Ian Marsh. I'd downloaded the text of the rules in my early internet days in 1996, but it's nice to have the book (and for only £2).

As you'd expect from Ian Marsh - a contributor to White Dwarf back in the 80s when it was good - the game has some interesting features, not least the attribute scale which is roughly exponential. Intelligence for example goes from 1 to 8, 1 being sentience and 8 being the level displayed by the Great Intelligence.

I also got Blood Harvest by Terrance Dicks. I didn't think much of Last Of The Gaderene, the only other NA/MA that I've read, so I'm trying again with a trusted author.