Venus And The Moon

If you live on East Coast and if you looked in to West in last few hours you might have seen a real bright blob of light. It's so bright and has "burning aura" (literally looks like flames) around it that I thought it will soon fall down as huge shooting star. So I just fired up my copy of TheSky software to see what's going on and came out with some neat surprise. Well, this is Venus and for next month or so it's gonna be visible long after sunsets and would stay pretty well above horizon (which is not very usual for Venus). With it's current magnitude of -4.0 that's way way too bright for normal night sky standards and it's gonna be even more brighter. If you trace path of Venus, it seems Venus and Moon both comes really really close (almost touching) on 23nd Feb, 2004 at around 17:34 which also happens to be Sunset time! And the beauty of the whole scene during this Sunset is that it would be really nice crescent moon. So watch out and put this date and time on your calendar!