Catching the Sky

I'm closing up shop at this blog as of today. I will continue to post photos -- astronomical and otherwise -- at my Flickr homepage . As I mentioned a little while ago, my handwritten astronomy journals stopped when I started Catching the Sky. I plan to resume writing in them now; handwritten journaling is one of the underrated joys. I don't ever plan to delete this page, and it's certainly possible that I will pick it up again at a future date. But for the time being, think of it as a closed shop. If I update The Conjunction Project , it will be a regular web page. Many thanks to all who have stopped by to read and/or comment. Clear skies to you!

For those who remember the Moon-Venus-Jupiter conjunction of September 2005, this will be a treat: below I've collected a few links to photos of that event as seen over the course of four days from various places around the world. 111 links to be precise, from 96 photographers in 21 countries. I've organized the links so that you can check out the photos in roughly the order that they were taken. As the Earth turned in an eastwardly direction, photographers farther to the west got to see the conjunction when dusk fell on their part of their world. So the links are ordered according to the longitudes of the photographers (to the best of my information). This does not produce an exact chronological order, as I discuss in the essay that follows, but it suffices to give a sense of the Moon moving across the sky in its monthlong orbit around the Earth. On each of the four days of the conjunction, the Moon appears in a new place with relation to Jupiter and Venus, as in the two phot