As you already know, I’m constantly looking up at the moon and stars. This past Friday night as I headed out to dinner with my daughter, the sky was especially stunning. My daughter saw it first and pointed it out. Jupiter, Venus and our Moon were perfectly aligned, and the moon, an impossibly thin crescent, was illuminated by earthshine. Just beautiful.
Flawlessly perfect
indeed beautiful , Kris! “Illuminated by earthshine”, what a lovely metaphor!
I love the term Earthshine too – but it’s an actual scientific term – for once, science can also be poetic
Earthshine happens when the Moon is a crescent but you can see the whole Moon – the dark portion of the Moon is illuminated by light reflected from the Earth. It’s kinda cool; I always love to look for it when I see a crescent Moon.
Great shot!
Nice photo
My son J and I looked at this last night. He’s a little young to understand Earthshine but I love showing him the stars
Beautiful indeed!
We’ve had an amazing streak of clear nights where I live, and several of my friends have been talking about this unusually exciting evening sky.
Did you see Mercury also tonight? It even made the news.
http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2012/0227/Venus-Jupiter-Mercury-and-moon-to-put-on-rare-spectacle-in-sky
The skies cleared up here in San Antonio just in time to catch this….in fact, it was impossible to miss. Great shot of it!
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I managed to get a gorgeous photo last night from my home in Los Angeles of the moon and Venus in conjunction. It’s available on my blog:
http://intheinfosphere.wordpress.com/2012/03/27/southern-california-home-of-the-stars/
I know you’ve been following the recent conjunctions of Venus and Jupiter and, though I didn’t manage to get Jupiter into the shot, I thought it’s a photo you’d want to see. Alas, by tonight that perfect proximity will be gone, but the moon should still be relatively close to Venus.