Hey
I’m in Southern California and I was just outside and was struck by a very beautiful crescent moon framed by two very bright stars (?) to the right of it.
One of the stars is, if the moon is the center of a clock, just below where the “3” would be.
The other is at about where the “5” would be (again, thinking of the moon as the center of a clock). The “5” is pretty big and very very bright. Is there a planet that should be visible right now- and is that where I should be seeing it?
From the Southern Hemisphere, it looks like a smiley face. Check out foxnews.com, they’ve got a little article and a picture taken by a guy in Brisbane.
Cool, my daughter and I were wondering what the second star was. We knew the bright one was Venus. We should have thought to ask here, I’m glad bienville did.
I missed the vanishing, but saw the emerging. I don’t think I missed much, as Venus was occluded at about 16:15, so the sky was pretty bright (in the UK) and we probably could not see the earthlit portion of the moon (and Venus would not have been too bright, either. Someone from further east would have had a better view.
Me too. I noticed it about 5:00 tonight as I was leaving for school. I figured it had to be the ISS, but when I looked again around 6:30 and it was still there, I was stumped.
Okay, two posts in this thread link to photos that would appear to be incompatible. Are both a frowny face and a smiley face possible on the same night, or is it because the photos were taken in different hemispheres?
No matter where on earth a photo is taken the “horns” of the moon will point in the same general direction (discounting parallax) with respect to the background stars and the planets.
What I think happens is that the photos were taken on different days, after the moon had moved. So first it was on one side and then it was on the other side of the planets.
Yeah, that’s what I was implying by my earlier post. I had just come in from seeing an upside-down frowny face at the time of the smiley claim, which didn’t add up. A one day difference would change that, but it would be a more right-side-up smiley face in the northern hemisphere.
It wouldn’t even take a day. The Moon moves 360 degrees through the sky in a month, which means about 13 degrees per day, or 26 times the diameter of the Moon, or about one diameter per hour. So it’d only take a few hours to go from smiley configuration to frowney.
Something like this is a lot of fun. I’d turn off the constellations at first for simplicity. You can move your mouse over each point of light to see what it is.
I was leaving work and looked up at just the right moment to see Venus emerging from occultation. There was quite a spectacular “diamond ring” effect. Within minutes there was clear sky between the moon and Venus. Both were about an hour from setting but Venus was moving faster than the moon as they both moved towards the western horizon.
Is there any easy-to-understand explanation for why Venus was outpacing the moon, rather than the other way around?
As Chronos noted, the moon travels across the fixed background at roughly a diameter per hour in the same direction as the Earth’s rotation. So the moon was falling from view this much more slowly than Venus. (If the moon-Earth tidal lock were complete, the moon would stay put in the sky as Venus set.)