Stars and Mars

Daylight veils and night-time reveals the most majestic sight of the planet Mars, like a huge red star, rising in the east soon after dark, dominating the sky. It's at its closest to the Sun right now, meaning that it's at its closest to us, and on the 16th was precisely aligned with the Earth and Sun. Oh! I tried so hard to get a photo showing how I felt when this planet appeared in the eastern windows each night, persisting, as if it wanted something. I'll give it! (This is the best my camera could do; there's a more awesome photo here.)

Dominating the southern sky not long ago were the two brilliant planets Jupiter and Saturn, so bright in the bedroom window that after settling in I got back up and went out to look at them. They're headed west, sinking soon after sunset. On December 21 (winter solstice!), look low in the southwest at sunset, and Jupiter and Saturn will be in a rare conjunction at 0 degrees of the sign Aquarius. This is also called "the Great Conjunction" and occurs every 19.6 years. Astronomers say that the star the Magi noticed and followed was a Jupiter-Saturn conjunction.

This 2020 at least the planets are with us and want to entertain us!

Explaining to the Aliens

I was whisked to another planet last night (that's okay; I wasn't working on deadline) and its inhabitants asked me to describe life on Earth. So I tried:

"Where I'm from, the whole world changes four times a year. There's a rainy time when the landscape is all greens and yellows, with pink flowering trees; then the days grow warm and sunny and colorful, and tiny glittering birds fly around randomly and drink from flowers, and Earthlings play, and plants extrude the most desirable kinds of foods: berries, tomatoes, scented herbs with all sorts of powers, some of them so secret that our scientists spend lifetimes studying them...

"Then fields and trees turn red and gold and orange, and vines bear grapes, which are little sweet meaty orbs in sheer skins, purple, red or green; and many kinds and shapes of squashes, hard-shelled and expressive like sculptures. Those sell for very cheap...Next comes a very quiet, chilly gray period when things, we call 'em snowflakes, weightless and no bigger than a nailhead, sometimes fall from the sky by the trillion and pile up in tons and tons and cover everything. And, get this, each one is a tiny six-sided geometrically perfect design and there are no two alike.

"And these four times repeat over and over, like magic; we just sit there, and the whole world changes all around us. The daylight changes, the constellations shift, and we have this huge perfectly spherical white rock floating in the sky called a moon, and everyone loves it, and it gives silver light and controls all the Earth's water..."