Two sugars in the Teaspoon

Here is the sky an hour before sunrise on Monday.

See the end-note about enlarging the illustration.

Venus passes a shade over a degree north of Saturn at 13h Universal Time, which is 1 PM in Britain but from 5 to 8 hours earlier by clocks in the contiguous United States.  It is close enough to the time of our picture as makes little difference, except for the angular direction between the pair.

Their magnitudes are -4.1 and 0.7, which means that Venus is 83 times the brighter – is reflecting 83 times more sunlight toward us.  They are drawn at 150 times true scale, so as to show the shape of their disks.  Venus’s shape is becoming chubbier, because she is departing ahead of us, to pass behind the Sun on August 14.

Here, irrelevant to Venus and Saturn, are a couple of illustrations I just spent some time working up (to go into white spaces in posters lije the Zodiac Wavy Chart) and decided to reject for that purpose; they’ll find another use sometime.

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DIAGRAMS in these posts are made with precision but have to be inserted in another format.  You may be able to enlarge them on your monitor.  One way: right-click, and choose “View image”, then enlarge.  Or choose “Copy image”, then put it on your desktop, then open it.  On an iPad or phone, use the finger gesture that enlarges (spreading with two fingers, or tapping and dragging with three fingers).  I am grateful to know of what methods work for you.