Icy cocktail

The very slender Young Moon will on September 5, at 10h by Universal Time, pass one degree south of Venus, close enough to occult (hide) the brilliant planet – as seen from Antarctica.

See the end note about enlarging illustrations. Arrows through the moving bodies show their movement (against the starry background) from 2 days earlier to 2 days later. The Moon and Sun are exaggerated 4 and 2 times in size.

The Moon is shown at its apparent position for the location on Earth, displaced by parallax; but the arrows are along its path as seen from the center of the Earth.

Thus you can see why the passage of the Moon’s center one degree south of Venus means that you would have to go far south to see the occultation. And even there you’d be lucky to see either Venus or the crescent Moon – only 5 percent sunlit – so close to the icy horizon because only 25° out from the Sun

Out-of-Focus Department

Dreams are the uncontrolled mind’s satires of the waking mind’s worries. I’ve been in an involved discussion across the Atlantic with the amazingly generous-minded team of experts at the famous EarthSky.org, who are helping to get the Astronomical Companion ready for re-publication – discussion about how best to use the them of planes in space: the plane of the horizon, the equatorial plane, ecliptic plane, plane of our Milky Way galaxy.

Dozing in a London train, I seemed to hear a version of the announcements that are constantly inflicted by loudspeaker on passengers who are tired of hearing them.

“This is an Equatorial Line plane to Orion’s Belt, terminating at Infinity. The next station is Maidenhead Junction. If you see anything that doesn’t look right, it’s probably a foreign particle. Adjust your eyepiece, or tell a member of the Naval Observatory staff. See it, say it, sor’ed. This is Fish Junction. Change here for the Ecliptic Line plane to North Taurus and South Archer. Please remember to take all your personal coordinates with you. MIND THE GAP between the plane and the planet!”

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This weblog maintains its right to be about astronomy or anything under the sun.

ILLUSTRATIONS 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” or ”Open image in new tab”, 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). Other methods have been suggested, such as dragging the image to the desktop and opening it in other ways.

Sometimes I make improvements or corrections to a post after publishing it.  If you click on the title, rather than on ‘Read more’, I think you are sure to see the latest version. Or, if you click ‘Refresh’ or press function key 5, you’ll see the latest version.