Rained out

Sigh. The best conjunction of the Moon and Venus in a long time, and my skies were so thick with rainclouds that not even the slightest glimmer of light shone through. I hope some of you got to see it.

I know a few people did, because I've gotten a bunch of hits from people searching for terms like "venus next to moon", "conjunction of the moon and", "what's happening with the celestial stars", and (my favorite) "what planet is out with the moon tonight 4-19-2007". (Even if you don't know what month it is, you can find the information you're looking for on Another Monkey!...actually, this worked because the Moon was actually near to Venus on April 19, too, though not as close as May 19.) These searches were probably conducted by people who saw this conjunction without knowing about it in advance. They noticed it on their own and took the trouble to look it up on the Internet! That's pretty cool.

Anyway. Some other, less cool stuff coming up: conjunction of the Moon and Saturn on the 22nd, Mercury sliding into Venus' neighborhood in the next week or so, Venus and Saturn eventually coming within 2/3 of a degree on June 30th. It looks like folks in Australia and thereabouts (anybody on the opposite side of the world from the U.S.) will see a conjunction of the Moon and Venus on the night of June 18 (I think, I'm interpolating from the positions of the Moon and Venus given for U.S. observers on the nights of June 17 and 18, and then I'm hoping I'm not getting the Australian date wrong, what with the International Date Line and the wallabies and Foster's and all that.)