Exactly As Beautiful To Us

For sky watchers this weekend might be pretty exciting if the sky stays clear.


Venus is getting ready to leave the evening sky.

The Moon is getting ready to return to the evening sky.


Late Saturday afternoon Venus and the Moon will share the evening sky for one last time this year.

Venus is already so low in the twilight it is easy to think she has already disappeared.

But if you use binoculars—or a camera with something like a 250mm or 300mm lens, something with good German optics Beethoven might have liked—and scan the horizon immediately as the Sun sets you can see Venus by looking just a little south of due west. Right now Venus is only about five or six degrees above the ground clutter around here just at sunset, but generally easy to see in 10x50 binoculars.

With a small telescope Venus shows a beautiful bright crescent.

When the Moon and Venus are only about three degrees apart in Saturday’s dusk through binoculars or a small telescope they will both be displaying beautiful crescents.

Just a few hundred years ago, looking at crescent Venus and the crescent Moon would have marked somebody as a revolutionary because they probably would have wondered why both bodies can appear as crescents and the answer, of course, is all wrapped up in the notion of the Sun as the center of the solar system, not the Earth as the center of the solar system and—in those days of Vatican controlled politics and science—speculating about the Sun as the center of the solar system marked somebody as a heretic.

Saturday the crescent Moon and crescent Venus will be exactly as beautiful to us as they were to Galileo when he looked at them through his little telescope in 1610.

He risked his life looking at them and talking about them.

Cynthiae Figuras Aemulatur Mater Amorum


The crescent Moon and crescent Venus will be exactly as beautiful to us as they were to Galileo.


How many people even will know they are there, low in the west? How many people will look?

Have you seen the stars tonight?
Would you like to go up on A-deck
And look at them with me?
Have you see the stars tonight?
Would you like to go up for a stroll
And keep me company?
Do you know
We can go
We are free
Any place we can think of
We can be
Have you see the stars tonight?
Have you looked at all
Around this room of stars?

Jefferson Starship
Have You Seen The Stars Tonight?

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Sundown In The Place Called Atlantis


Selene Still Loves Endymion


Looking Away From Selene And Endymion