Right after sunset tonight, if you look in the southwestern sky in North America, you’re likely to be richly rewarded!  This is a night to get out the telescope and gather the kids together! You’ll see a close conjunction between three bright solar system objects: the Moon, Venus, and Jupiter. If you have binoculars, you might even be able to fit all three of them in the field of view.  It should look something like this:

I’m borrowing the following text from Space.com’s colomnist Joe Rao, since he already did all the work and I couldn’t say it any better myself!  Here is the link to the full article.

Every once in a while, something will appear in the night sky that will attract the attention of even those who normally don’t bother looking up. It’s likely to be that way on Monday evening, Dec. 1.
A slender crescent moon, just 15-percent illuminated, will appear in very close proximity to the two brightest planets in our sky, Venus and Jupiter.

People who are unaware or have no advance notice will almost certainly wonder, as they cast a casual glance toward the moon on that night, what those two “large silvery stars” happen to be? Sometimes, such an occasion brings with it a sudden spike of phone calls to local planetariums, weather offices and even police precincts. Not a few of these calls excitedly inquire about “the UFOs” that are hovering in the vicinity of our natural satellite.

A very close conjunction of the crescent moon and a bright star or planet can be an awe-inspiring naked-eye spectacle. Also on Monday evening, you may be able to see the full globe of the moon, its darkened portion glowing with a bluish-gray hue interposed between the sunlit crescent and not much darker sky. This vision is sometimes called “the old moon in the young moon’s arms.” Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) was the first to recognize it as what we now call “earthshine.”

Those using binoculars or a small telescope will certainly enjoy the almost three-dimensional aspect of the moon, but Venus will be rather disappointing appearing only as a brilliant blob of light, for right now, it’s a small, featureless gibbous disk. That will change in the coming weeks, however, as Venus approaches Earth and the angle it makes between us and the Sun allows it to evolve into a “half-moon” phase in mid January, and a lovely crescent phase of its own during the latter part of February and March.

Jupiter on the other hand is a far more pleasing sight with its relatively large disk, cloud bands and its retinue of bright Galilean satellites. All four will be in view on Monday evening, with Callisto sitting alone on one side of Jupiter, Ganymede, Io and Europa will be on the other side. Io and Europa will in fact, appear very close to each other, separated by only about one-sixth the apparent width of Jupiter.

Please come back and share your experiences if you see this spectacle for yourself!  I know we’ll be out there!

UPDATED TO ADD:

I just took this with my digital SLR, hand held, auto focus, available light (natch!).  Click on the image to view it full size.  What are you seeing?

1 Corinthians 15:40 There are also celestial bodies and terrestrial bodies; but the glory of the celestial is one, and the glory of the terrestrial is another. 41 There is one glory of the sun, another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars; for one star differs from another star in glory.

Tags: Christian, December, Jupiter, Moon, Night sky, Space, star, Venus

By the time I received this email from my cousin Courtney, the “forward” was 10 levels deep.  This baby’s getting around!  Actually, this particular urban legend is enjoying a second life after last year’s viral campaign claiming an egg can be cooked by placing it between two activated cell phones.  The concept seems to have originated from an article written on the Wymsey Village Web site in 2000.  Though the site publishes spoofs, some genius (maybe two or three of ‘em) decided to take that ball and run with it.  And we, the ever-wiilling to swallow whatever looks like it might be juicy, slam-dunked it right into lore (Source: snopes.com).

Alas, we are easily bored, so if the same old hoax is to keep us fascinated, it needs a shiny new coat of paint.  In June of this year, the new model was rolled out, making me wonder why it took so long to reach my inbox.  The email carried a couple of comments from a few of the people who had forwarded it.  Comments like:

“THIS IS WHY YOU NEED TO STOP USING YOUR CELL PHONE SO MUCH!!  Check this out!”

There was a single word below that linked me to a video and promised me I would not believe my eyes.  The word was:

POPCORN

Let’s face it, popcorn is a much more dynamic food than eggs.  At least, from what you can see with the naked eye.  Here’s what the link led me to:

Wasn’t that fun?

Now, if you’ve never encountered this concept before, chances are good you’ll do the same thing you did when you saw emails like the other one’s I’ve posted in this blog (Bill Cosby is running for president and the “front fell off” an Australian oil tanker): You’ll wonder for a minute or two whether this could really happen.  But, let me make this very, very easy for you.  It can’t.  The three scenes in the video were actually part of a marketing campaign for a company called Cardo Systems, which manufactures wireless headsets (among other things).  The YouTube community gobbled it up like cotton candy and a simple search on “cell phone popcorn” yields almost as many copycat videos as smarty-pants debunking videos.  Go ahead and play with that over at YouTube if you have some free time on your hands.  It’s good, mindless fun.  But, I wouldn’t recommend actually getting your friends together with their cell phones and sitting around a coffee table for an hour trying to discover the truth about this for yourself.  There is a difference, you know, between good, mindless fun and a complete waste of time!

In the interest of responsible reporting, I feel compelled to spend a moment on the current facts about the dangers (or lack of danger) of using your cell phone.  Here’s a video from a 2007 Fox News broadcast:

And, for a more recent update, here’s a blog from Brian Dunning called Skeptoid that brings it all together very nicely.  It has links to articles, references, and everything!  I just became a fan of Skeptoid while researching this post!  Of course, since he’s an atheist, I wish I could use my cell phone to transmit the truth of the Gospel of Jesus Christ right in to his doubting brain, but he’s a smart guy and does some very good work.

I’ll leave you with one heartfelt request:  Please hang up and drive!

Proverbs 21:28 A false witness shall perish, But the man who hears him will speak endlessly.

Tags: brain damage, brian dunning, cardo, cell phone, Christian, hoax, popcorn, skeptoid, Snopes, urban legend, wymsey village web, YouTube