Getting on the "E" plane - with a push from Venus and the Pleiades

Bren and I caught Venus dropping in on the Seven Sisters the other night. Pretty – and it certainly drove home the message of a hundred-fold difference in brightness. That is Venus is at about –4 and the Pleiades have a collective rating of magnitude 1.6.

You could easily fit both in the same binocular field - but Venus really screamed at you in comparison as her clouds reflected all that sunlight. Let's see – that was two night ago, I believe – Just as the rain was moving in. the rain was a bit behind schedule, so we had only partial clouds and since it will be five years before Venus comes this close – actually closer than this – to the Pleiades again, I was happy to get a quick look.

Tonight the rain is pulling out and we have intermittent high clouds. I'm hoping to get some observing done with the video in preparation for "Project Bright Star" – the observing for the blind which is scheduled for next weekend. So I've set up the video camera just in case I get a break in the clouds. But on the way in from the observatory there was a break and I saw Venus again and I paused to wonder, not simply at how dominant it is, but because it made the ecliptic pop into place for me. I could clearly see the ecliptic, not only projected against the sky dome, but also from above as the plane of the solar system.

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The solar system is more plate, than ball, with most of the "stuff" sticking to a plane. This image taken in 1994 by the lunar prospecting Clementine spacecraft. showss (from left-to-right ) Mercury, mars, Saturn, the glare of the Sun and the Moon lit by Earthshine.

I find it much harder to really wrap my mind around that. I don’t know about you, but it feels to me like the plane of the solar system should be a projection of the horizon circle onto the dome of the sky. Afterall, we're standing upright and while I have known since childhood that the Earth is titled on its axis, the whole business still makes me feel a bit queasy when I pry it loose from the purely intellectual realm and drop it into my gut. And that's what came home as I could see the ecliptic reaching across the sky from where the sun had set, where Venus was, where I know Saturn is behind some clouds and where I know the Moon and Jupiter will be in the morning.

These are the kinds of mental gymnastics I find important – just exercises, but I feel each time I do one I get a bit closer to making this little corner of the universe I call home fit into the rest of it.