Cosmic Display

When awesome cosmic things settle in the sky on a clear night especially if its clear for 3 nights in a row, well I guess I should pay attention.  As I pulled into the driveway last night to competing lightening and thunder, billowing clouds darker than the darkening sky hurrying from east to west, I finally took real notice of the crescent moon with its two extremely bright trailing planets directly in front of me in the western sky.  Soon the giant cumulus clouds would cover the celestial anomoly and possibly it would be gone and I would have missed it.  I went inside and pulled out the camera.  I am not an accomplished night sky photographer yet I wanted to give it a try. 

There is something surreal about this event, in my humble opinion.  The first night I noticed the show in the sky, the moon was a tiny, sliver of a moon with Jupiter and Venus as bright as a bright can be trailing along in an otherwise dark sky. My thought was, Star Trek.  Their appearance was so spectacularly other-worldly that it seemed as if I had been transported to alien world.

But wait, that's not all that is going on in the sky.  At the opposite end of the compass point, rising in the east are Mars and later Saturn.  Big, bold Mars, God of War in Roman culture actually is a loving kind of god, who considered war only as a way to secure peace.  Separated across the night sky from his lover Venus who rides on the toga tails of Jupiter, I find it coincidental that there is such a separation between not only Venus but also his non-father Jupiter.  Juno, in retaliation for Jupiter's brainiac conception of Minerva, had the goddess, Flora rub a magic flower across her stomach and brought forth Mars.  No wonder they all keep their distances.  
 
The beauty didn't last and soon the clouds approaching from the southwest overshadowed the clear, white light of Madame Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus and Saturn.  The wind kicked up, rain beat on the house until eventually the lights flickered wildly and then winked out just like their spectral cousins leaving everything as dark as an alley in ancient Rome.

Evidently, tonight is one of the best nights to see the stellar march of the Gods across the sky.  For more information about these celestial events, here is a good website. 

http://earthsky.org/tonight/all-five-visible-planets-light-up-march-2012-evening-sky