![](\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/bsgfx\/greatconjunction.jpg\")
<\/p>\nLast night, whilst grilling, I was pleased to go outside and see a bright star in the sky.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I got out my binoculars and took a look; yes, it was indeed two planets so close together that they looked like a single unit to the naked eye. I don’t have a tripod for my phone, unlike the artist formerly known as the One Hand Clapping Guy<\/a>. So you get a dot, kind of like I saw.<\/p>\n My oldest saw me taking the binoculars out to the driveway, so he followed; he thought it was cool, so he told his brother, whom I then took out on the deck for a peek. I even coaxed my beautiful wife out to take a peek. They all thought it was neat, and then they went back to their other [electronic] endeavors.<\/p>\n You know, when I was in middle school, I was all down with astronomy. One of my father’s childhood books, a volume on astronomy, passed down to me, and I checked other books out of the library to read up on astronomy as it was understood in the 1960s. I lay on my back on my aunt’s yard in St. Charles and tried to draw a sky chart. I was very in tune with the position of the planets daily–but that came with the help of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch<\/em>, which posted that information along with the daily weather report. But when 1986 rolled around, and we were living in the well-lit trailer park when Halley’s Comet came around. I might have seen it. I saw a smudge in the morning sky where the paper said it should be.<\/p>\n About that time, my interest in astronomy waned, which is just as well. I lived in well-lit areas after that. Even the house down the gravel road had close neighbors on either side with lights in their back yards and on their chicken coop, and I had a massive hill immediately for my western horizon.<\/p>\n Still, I thought the night was very dark when I moved to Nogglestead, but the horizons are shrinking with light from new developments and growing towns to the east and west. But I have, when I have thought of it and when news coverage prompted me, to go try to see a meteor shower or whatnot. I might have actually seen a meteor once a couple years back, but it was blink-and-it’s-gone, so I’m not sure.<\/p>\n So I was surprised and mutely delighted to actually see an astronomical phenomenon. One that Genghis Khan might have thought was a good omen. I’d like to try to treat it as such, but I am all-too-familiar with the Bayeux Tapestry<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Last night, whilst grilling, I was pleased to go outside and see a bright star in the sky. I got out my binoculars and took a look; yes, it was indeed two planets so close together that they looked like a single unit to the naked eye. I don’t have a tripod for my phone, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3334,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27352","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27352","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3334"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27352"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27352\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27354,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27352\/revisions\/27354"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27352"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27352"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27352"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}