The days are nine till Valentine, but that could give you lead time to find a Bemyvalentine idea and save you from being a Delayintine! And there’s nothing else as pleasant happening in between.
The planet of love will, this year, be smiling at you in the evening sky before going down to bed.
See the end note about enlarging illustrations.
She will pass very close south of her uncle Neptune on February 15, and you just might be able with binoculars to pick him out in Venus’s dazzle. Their magnitudes are -4.0 and 8.0 in the logarithmic scale used in astronomy, meaning that Venus is about 63,000 times brighter.
Her father Jupiter is higher in the sky but also outshone, by about two magnitudes; and her grandfather Saturn is down at conjunction behind the Sun on Feb. 16.
Saint Valentine’s Day will forever make me think of that bit of verse scrawled by some lover on a wall in Pompeii –
Quisquis amat valeat, pereat qui nescit amare.
Bis tanto pereat quisquis amare vetat
Long live whoever loves! Perish who knows not how!
Whoever love forbids, twice over perish!
The root meaning of Latin val- is “strength, worth, health,” and it has given English a crop of words, such as value, valor, valid, equivalent. And valency, the measure of the power of a chemical element to bond to others. A hydrogen atom has a valency of 1; a carbon atom, 4; and that explains the structure of many molecules.
As we might expect, there were rather numerous Roman emperors named Valens, Valentinianus, Valerius. There was one pope Valentine. He was the hundredth pope, and reigned briefly in the year 827. His story is quite juicy. He was such a favorite of his predecessor, Eugene II, that he was rumored to be either the son or the lover of Eugene, upon whose death he was rushed by the Roman nobles to the papal palace before he had even been ordained as a priest. Nor was there time for him to be ratified by the Holy Roman emperor (Louis the Pious, son of Charlemagne), because he died after just forty days in office. He had not, we might say, been validated.
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There was also around that time Valentinus who was along with Marion and Basilides one of the most famous Gnostics.The evenings are now too light in the area where Neptune is to see it but Venus and Jupiter punch through and look very beautiful as they cruise towards each other.On the 30th of January I did see something in that part of the sky I’d been hoping to see for years…. Nacreous Clouds AKA Polar Stratospheric Clouds.First time I have ever seen these clouds which are about 25km up thus illuminated after the Sun has set and the Tropospheric clouds are dark.I’d guess that they are made up of water bonding to meteor dust like their higher summer Noctilucent Cloud relatives?