Conjunction of Inanna and Theia's Child Tonight

There was quite the spectacle in the heavens tonight, the conjunction of Inanna and Theia's child. Obviously some explanation is needed here since most people refer to these heavenly bodies as the planet Venus and the Moon. Inanna was the Sumerian name for the brightest planet, and they may have been the first people to surmise that the Morning Star and the Evening Star were the same object. The goddess they worshipped morphed into Ishtar and influenced the idea of Aphrodite. Venus was the Roman version of the deity.

Theia refers to the Mars-sized planetoid that collided with Earth early in her history that resulted in the formation of the Moon. The event probably took place about 4.51 billion years ago, very shortly after the formation of Earth itself. The hypothesis explains many of the odd chemical characteristics shared by the Moon and the Earth.

This picture was taken 45 minutes earlier than the first. Note the change in the position of he Moon (it moves much faster against the background.

In any case it was a beautiful sight tonight in the western sky shortly after sunset. I took pictures over a period of about 45 minutes and the relative position of the two celestial bodies was noticeably different.

And Mercury Makes Four. Beautiful Gathering in the Morning Sky

There is still a beautiful show in the sky in the early morning this month. When I realized I missed Mercury in my Friday morning picture, I went out again this morning for another try, and caught it between the trees on the eastern horizon. It's only the fourth or fifth time that I've seen Mercury (mostly out of laziness because you have to know just where to look), and only the second time I've photographed it.

In all the excitement about Pluto and Ceres over the last few months, it might be good to remember that NASA and the European Space Agency have been on a real winning streak of late. There are the tireless surface vehicles on Mars, the Cassini exploration of Saturn, the Galileo mission to Jupiter, and the Messenger mission to Mercury that have given us an unprecedented look at our Solar System. It is simply stunning that we have in just 58 years of space travel that we have had such success in exploring our nearest neighbors in space, and that they have turned out to be places of the imagination. No one could have predicted in 1957 that the moons and planets of our Solar System could have been so strange and wonderful.