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Skyward

Wed, 7 Apr 2010, 08:39 AM (-06:00) Creative Commons License

1. At the campground

We were celebrating my birthday. Camping at Pedernales Falls. The days were warm and sunny. The evenings were cool. And there was no burn ban, so we were able to sit late into the night staring into the glowing embers of a campfire.

One night as we were watching Orion and Sirius and Castor and Pollux arc across the sky, I saw a dot moving steadily across the sky. No blinking slights. Just a small, bright dot traveling up from the south to the northeast.

“Look,” I said. “It’s the space station!”

Trudy looked up. “Cool!”

And then it passed behind the trees.

2. Coming back from the soccer fields

The dog always reminds us lest we forget. This night was no exception. And so the three of us, Guinness, Trudy and I, were out at the soccer fields taking a stroll. It was just after sunset, and the sky in the west was a dark pink as we left the house.

The bright lights of the soccer field were behind us as we returned. And a piece of the western sky, now mostly black with a hint of deep blue on the horizon, rose before us between the trees that line the street.

And in that slice of sky, we saw two evening stars: Venus a bright white star that we all have seen in the evening or in the morning and Mercury a small, dimmer, pinkish star down and to the right, closer to the sun.

Connecting the dots, you could almost see the plane of the ecliptic spreading across the sky.

© jumpingfish by David Hasan is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License