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Rose clouds of twilight truth
Mar. 14th, 2012 12:56 am
Currently at Toronto Pearson: 4. High today: 17. The whole Accuweather 15-day has highs running from six to fourteen degrees above normal. So far in 2012, the high temperature has been above normal on 68 days; below normal on 14. If the forecast holds (which is far from certain), it'll be 83 to 14. The UW weather station reported a December-January-February "meteorological winter" warmer than 2001-02.
( Jupiter and Venus this evening: )
I wonder what we look like from there. Are we blue?
So, I don't know that they look closer together, but Jupiter is definitely below Venus now. It is strange to see a bright star-like object lower in the sky than Venus.
I am of course uneasy, as I always am when I go through one of these picture-taking things, about all this photographic mediation. But then the fact is that, for better or worse, I wouldn't be looking at these planets so much if I wasn't taking pictures (dozens of pictures, most of which I end up deleting because they're too unsteady or too dark) of them. This is something I always find frustrating about looking at interesting things in the sky: you look at it, you've seen it, now what? It's already a problem with lunar eclipses, which do move and change, but slowly. I feel like the thing needs to be witnessed, it feels wrong to go inside when the moon is eclipsed, even to come back out and see it differently twenty minutes later, and yet it's hard to say what the point is of staying out there staring at it when it's "not doing anything". The stars and planets hardly do anything at all, although Venus does get brighter and brighter, after starting out already incredibly bright. (I do suspect that a lot of people in the city figure that Venus is a satellite or something. Better safe than sorry; it's wrong to wish on space hardware.) This is why you need festivals for astronomical events--I was thinking tonight, surely, sometime, someplace, there must have been festivals when Jupiter fell below Venus in the sky--to keep all of us out there, watching, all of it, not each at once, but all together.
( Here's somebody prowling around while I was out there with my camera: )
( Jupiter and Venus this evening: )
I wonder what we look like from there. Are we blue?
So, I don't know that they look closer together, but Jupiter is definitely below Venus now. It is strange to see a bright star-like object lower in the sky than Venus.
I am of course uneasy, as I always am when I go through one of these picture-taking things, about all this photographic mediation. But then the fact is that, for better or worse, I wouldn't be looking at these planets so much if I wasn't taking pictures (dozens of pictures, most of which I end up deleting because they're too unsteady or too dark) of them. This is something I always find frustrating about looking at interesting things in the sky: you look at it, you've seen it, now what? It's already a problem with lunar eclipses, which do move and change, but slowly. I feel like the thing needs to be witnessed, it feels wrong to go inside when the moon is eclipsed, even to come back out and see it differently twenty minutes later, and yet it's hard to say what the point is of staying out there staring at it when it's "not doing anything". The stars and planets hardly do anything at all, although Venus does get brighter and brighter, after starting out already incredibly bright. (I do suspect that a lot of people in the city figure that Venus is a satellite or something. Better safe than sorry; it's wrong to wish on space hardware.) This is why you need festivals for astronomical events--I was thinking tonight, surely, sometime, someplace, there must have been festivals when Jupiter fell below Venus in the sky--to keep all of us out there, watching, all of it, not each at once, but all together.
( Here's somebody prowling around while I was out there with my camera: )
