Armchair observation
The Moon was very near to Venus in the sky tonight. It took me by surprise as I had not been following the Moon’s phases closely but with my western-facing living room windows it was very difficult to miss an unusually bright Venus next to a bare sliver of a crescent Moon in the evening sky tonight.
Through the binoculars the Moon was stunning. Usually even with earthglow it’s difficult to make out features on the shadowed side of the Moon, but the earthglow was particularly bright. The Sea of Showers and Ocean of Storms were fully visible.
Through the binoculars the crescent of Venus was again visible. I was momentarily surprised to see that Venus’ crescent was still farther from new than the Moon’s despite its apparent relative proximity to the Sun. It didn’t take very long to realize that this is because Venus literally is much closer to the Sun, so the light hitting Venus from the Sun is at a much greater angle to us than the light hitting the moon. Seeing this gave a rare depth to the sky. For a moment, the sky no longer seemed like light painted on a dome with all the lights at the same apparent distance, but as it actually is with perspective and depth. It’s spooky and almost chilling how much emptiness there is between us and our nearest neighbors, and marvelous to see the evening sky and perceive our solar system in three dimensions.
Moments like this when I come closer to comprehending the distances and scale of our cosmic neighborhood are precious. Too often the solar system appears in my mind as a scale model with billiard balls representing the planets and distances only as abstract numbers. However inadequate to understanding these scales, however inaccurate my understanding of these distances may be, I still prefer these moments to the times when I see only the celestial dome.
I wish that I had a camera with a longer lens and better exposure control, but I could not resist popping the screens out of my window and setting up the tripod with my point-and-shoot. I shot about four dozen photos through my living room window tonight, but all were pretty similar and none have the detail I wanted so much to capture. Somehow it’s still a pleasure for me to sort through them all, but really the two I’m attaching to this post pretty much tell it all.
It’s a little strange to me to do any observing from indoors, but the living room is really the best view of the Western sky I have without going a few blocks uphill, and it’s actually the place where I have the most control over the light around me unless I leave the City limits.
However, if I’d known how spectacular the evening sky would be, it would have been worth a ride either down the peninsula or up the coast. The Moon is only two days past new; tomorrow evening the crescent will still be fairly thin, but it won’t be so near to Venus as it was tonight. It’ll be another eleven months before the Moon is near Venus in the evening sky again, and then another five or six months before Venus starts to appear as bright as it is now. There certainly will be other chances, but not very soon.
