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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. 

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