The Sky

It's always a pleasure to watch the night sky with its zillions of celestial bodies. But, with today's mindless 'development', it is impossible to watch a clear sky in cities, what with skyscrapers, pollution and the ambient light. Things are not so bad in the villages yet. Iam still fortunate to be able to see a reasonably clear sky from my present residence at Bangalore especially when there is a power cut which is not infrequent.

One of the most interesting events in sky-watching is when there is an occasional confluence of the celestial objects such as the moon and planets and of course, the chance sight of a meteor. Given alongside are photographs of two such events, one, the rendezvous of Venus with moon and the other, the confluence of moon, Venus and Jupiter. In the first case, which occurred in February, 2004, Venus appeared to be very close to moon though in reality it is 307 times farther than moon from earth. Venus was so brilliant because it was closer to the Sun than Earth so it got lit more brightly. It was looking like a tear drop from moon. Venus is sometimes called our sister planet because it is similar in size to Earth.

The Moon-Venus-Jupiter confluence occurred on 1st December 2008 and I could just get one shot before the clouds intervened. It was as if the crescent moon was winking and smiling! This phenomenon occurs once in four years.