“Trudy, you have to come see this,” I said, coming in from the backyard.<\/p>\n
“Is it about the compost?” she asked.<\/p>\n
“No,” I said and walked back outside.<\/p>\n
“Wow,” she said, looking at the clear sky. “The stars are bright.”<\/p>\n
Back in the fall, just as it was starting to get cool at night, Trudy and I sat on the bench in the front yard looking east with Venus setting behind us. Jupiter was rising.<\/p>\n
We gazed at Jupiter and looked at the Galilean satellites with binoculars. I kept turning my head to the west to look at Venus, too. What an amazing light show, one in the west going down, one in the east coming up.<\/p>\n
That was months ago. In the meantime, Jupiter has been catching up to Venus.<\/p>\n
I had just worked out at the gym. The sun had gone down a while before. Now it was mostly night.<\/p>\n
Venus was shining bright above fading dim red memory of sunset. Jupiter was higher in the sky. The Moon was next. And now I turned to the east to see reddish Mars rising.<\/p>\n
And I turned back to the west to find Mercury.<\/p>\n
The reddish\/pink of day’s end was still too bright, and there was nothing to see from the horizon up to Venus. So I stood out there and searched, not knowing quite where to look.<\/p>\n
I walked around the parking lot, thinking that the glow of the streetlights might have been the problem. But there was nothing to see, no stars and certainly no Mercury.<\/p>\n
I started walking to my car but stopped short. I turned back and headed out into a field beyond the parking lot. A man walking into the gym eyed me nervously. I smiled as we passed and kept walking.<\/p>\n
And then I looked up and it was there: Mercury clearly visible just above the last hints of sunset.<\/p>\n
Mercury and then Venus shining brightly and then Jupiter and then the Moon and then Mars.\u00a0The plane of the ecliptic etched across the heavens above me.<\/p>\n
We are standing in the backyard in the dark. Orion is directly overhead.<\/p>\n
“Wow. The stars are bright,” Trudy says.<\/p>\n
“Look over there,” I say.<\/p>\n
I point to the west.\u00a0And there they are, shining brightly side by side over the roof of the house: Venus to the right, Jupiter to the left and just a little bit behind.<\/p>\n