The Amazing Night Sky

It is getting dark *so* early. I miss the long days of summer, but the early darkness does give us more waking hours to enjoy the night sky.

After looking at the sky for a while after sunset this evening, talking about moon phases, eclipses (remembering the lunar eclipse we got up early to watch from our trampoline a few years ago), and planets (reminiscing about when Pluto got "demoted"), Riley came in and spent some time on one of our favorite websites, spaceweather.com. He read about and looked at their photo gallery of the auroras, linked to NASA's site to a video of the spooky red auroras in 2003, watched close-up videos of the sun on Sun-In-Motion, and voted for Pluto to be redeemed as a full-fledged planet.

We ended up heading back outside, this time to our front yard where we could see southward to see Jupiter in very close proximity to the moon.

I let my camera battery die the other day and forgot until just now to recharge it, so I don't have pictures of the moon and Jupiter, but there is a good one from Ankara, Turkey here and a couple more from Iraq here. And now I'm going to go back outside and ponder the similarities between those views from the other side of the globe and the view outside my front door. And I'm going to try really hard to get that old American Tale song out of my head. "It helps to think we're sleeping underneath the same big skyyyyyyy."