At peak magnitude, seek out the goddess of love planet in a clear blue sky in the west-southwest during daylight hours, being extremely careful to keep eyes diverted from the sun.
I find myself alternately looking up to my favorite summer constellations, then lowering my eyes to the pulsating world of lightning bugs in the landscape around me.
Time-based learning incentivizes teachers to pass students regardless of whether they’ve proven proficiency, because no one wants to hold a kid back. This is how we get the phenomenon of functionally illiterate high school graduates.
I looked up. In every direction the stars were twinkling. From flashing Sirius in the southwest to pulsing Arcturus in the east, something out of the ordinary was happening.
Our excitement with the quickening change of season, most evident in longer days, can only be equaled at nightfall when we discover the harbinger of spring constellation, Leo the Lion.
Then, all of a sudden, things got busy, fast. The team was assigned to disaster relief demolition and reconstruction work in Lake Charles, La., a small industrial city that has, Claudia said, “A very different vibe than New Orleans.”
Today and tomorrow, while observing Jupiter and Saturn in the southwest, turn to face the opposite skyline, east-northeast, to meet the great orb of the rising moon.
Outdoors, low in the southwest at twilight, planet Jupiter, a brilliant point of star-like light, and dimmer Saturn, now to its left, appear nearly inseparable to the naked eye, their closest proximity in four centuries.
For the first time in nearly eight centuries — yes, not since 1226 — this “greatest of great conjunctions” will be observable Monday, Dec. 21, 2020, coinciding, by chance, with the winter solstice.
During the long nights that precede the arrival of astronomical winter on Dec. 21, we have the opportunity to observe the celestial harbinger of the new season, the constellation Orion, in both the darkness of night and pre-dawn sky.
For our ancestors, oil lamps, candles and open fires lit the darkness. To make light was a triumph. Natural materials, gathered from the wild and farmed, were the hard-earned fuel for creating light.
