Beautiful sky!

Yesterday the kids and I met with our 4-H group and went shopping. The group had raised $7000 to spend on purchasing Christmas presents for the children in St. Jude's Hospital and it was shopping day! We had quite a hard time spending the money (you know, one-income homeschooling families are not used to buying expensive toys) and after 4 hours of shopping still had quite a lot of $$ left to spend.

Anyway, that evening on our way to the parking lot, one of the children noticed the beautiful crescent moon flanked by two very bright stars. No other stars were visible in the sky. I told them that they probably weren't stars, but lights from airplanes or something. However, ten minutes later when we arrived home we noticed the "planes" hadn't moved at all! I then suggested that maybe they were planets, because I didn't think stars ever shone that brightly. Chloe suggested that maybe they were dying stars, giving off their final bursts of light.

Anyway, we asked Poppy about it when we got home and he said, "Oh, those are planets- Venus and Jupiter". Mystery solved!

Later, I opened my mail to see this:
"When the sun goes down tonight, step outside and look south. Beaming through the twilight is one of the prettiest things you'll ever see--a tight three-way conjunction of Venus, Jupiter and the crescent Moon. The event is visible from all parts of the world, even from light-polluted cities. People in New York and Hong Kong will see it just as clearly as astronomers watching from remote mountaintops. Only cloudy weather or a midnight sun (sorry Antarctica!) can spoil the show."


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It was fun to see!