Science Musings Blog

Oh, these magnificent tropical dawns. Now here comes the Moon again, swimming down into the morning, pacing Jupiter, then Venus. Venus! At its brightest. Ablaze in the awakening sky at magnitude - 4.6, visible even when the Sun has climbed above the horizon. This is the daytime star that Shelley writes about in To a Skylark:

Keen as are the arrows
Of that silver sphere,
Whose intense lamp narrows
In the white dawn clear
Until we hardly see -- we feel that it is there.