Hōkūhele *
This is Venus:
Girlfriend has a hot date with this guy:
As everyone knows, Venus is the goddess of love, beauty, and fertility.
I can't see anything without my contacts."
In the old days, Venus was joined in holy matrimony with the god of the underworld, but these are modern times, and sister is a liberated woman these days.
Well, she's getting there. Anyhoodle, Venus is on her way to meet this handsome dude, who also happens to be head honcho and king of the gods:
Throw a little Aquanet on there, and I'm good to go."
Even the deities are getting caught up in the reality dating craze, and we all get to watch. As the sun sets each night between now and November 30, look to the south / southwest and watch for Jupiter. It'll look like a freaky bright yellow-orange star, pretty low in the sky. Keep your eye on Jupiter, and you'll see Venus sashaying toward him from the lower right. True to her "goddess of beauty" title, she's a beautiful bright white star-like object, and is actually the second-brightest natural object you'll ever see in the night sky, after the Moon.
If you want to be scientific about it, what you see when you look up into the evening sky is sunlight reflecting off of Jupiter, the largest planet in the Solar System, and Venus, the hottest planet.
As we all know from science class, Jupiter is a gas giant with no solid surface. It's so large that if it was hollow like an Easter egg, we could fit nearly 1000 full Earths inside. It has 63 moons that we know about, and a storm on the side twice the size of our entire planet. Pretty wicked.
Venus is a terrestrial planet like Earth, and the two are nearly the same size. The ridiculous amount of clouds account for a monster greenhouse effect, which keeps the surface at a blistering 860+ degrees Fahrenheit. Oh, and they also rain sulfuric acid down onto the surface. Very romantic!
On November 30 and December 1, the two lovebirds will meet up in conjunction, and will be only an apparent finger-width apart near the Moon in the evening sky. After that, Venus will pass Jupiter and wander off, getting a little higher in the sky each night. It's definitely a rare spectacle, not to be repeated until 2012. I know I'll definitely be checking it out.
Don't make me smack you with my handbag."
cool article #1
cool article #2
*ancient Hawaiian name for the planets. It means "wandering stars."
Labels: geekitude
About Me
Name: velocibadgergirl
I'm an unrepentant science nerd. I talk too much, read voraciously, and have mostly given up swearing. I have degrees in geology and creative writing, but my job doesn't have too much to do with either. I'm married to MB, the greatest guy on the whole entire planet. We're doing our best to raise a good dog (adopted April 2008) and a happy kid (born January 2010). It's not always easy, but together we're finding our way.
velocibadgergirl (at) gmail dot com
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→ it's as if they know me
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Pandora
→ the best music site ever -
playlist.com
→ source of nifty song-playing widgets
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Postsecret
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→ (monthly space slideshows)
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Peep Surgery
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An Empirical Study of Foil Hats
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Aluminum Foil Deflector Beanie
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Marginalia
— © Billy Collins
Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.
Other comments are more offhand, dismissive —
"Nonsense." "Please!" "HA!!" —
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
who wrote "Don't be a ninny"
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.
Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls "Metaphor" next to a stanza of Eliot's.
Another notes the presence of "Irony"
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.
Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
"Absolutely," they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
"Yes." "Bull's-eye." "My man!"
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.
And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written "Man vs. Nature"
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.
We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.
Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird singing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page —
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.
And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling.
Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed
when I found on one page
A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil —
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet —
"Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love."
I believe in God, only I spell it Nature. — Frank Lloyd Wright
4 Comments:
What a fantastic fusion of Roman mythology and astronomy. Well done!
Very cool! I will definitely check it out and let the girls stay up to see it too. Thanks!
Does Girlfriend know that if she keeps running around with no bra, she'll turn 50 and those perky bobs will be heading South.
So you can see the planet activity clearly without a telescope?
Yep, you should be able to see them very well without a telescope. Now, you won't be able to see the stripes on Jupiter or the clouds on Venus...they'll just look like super-bright stars.
I was able to see Jupiter from downtown Chicago two summers ago, so the planets really do blaze up there.
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