Fragments From Floyd

It was early January, 1978. The wife was home with a two-week-old child. I told her that I was going to be gone for the night, and she could expect me home the next day about breakfast time. I plannned to be out running around with the boys. But no, it's not what you think. The physics prof and I set up the college scope and waited in the cold for the party to begin. It was very, very cold. We went inside briefly to warm up. He offered me a cup of hot water. No coffee. No tea. Just hot water. But he was Chinese and we often surprised each other with customs seen in semi-private that did not appear in our official roles as faculty.

Finally, the moment arrived, between 1:00 and 1:15. The crescent moon moved closer and closer to occultation of the planet Venus. We caught it with the Nikon telescope-mounted camera just as the brilliant planet began to disappear behind the dark mountains of the moon. We took the film to the darkroom and saw the image for the first time as it appeared out of the wet photopaper. It was worth waiting for, and the Roanoke Times published it the next day.

The reason I bring this up just now is that, starting tomorrow and continuing for a couple of days, the Planet Venus and the moon will come in very close proximity (though not an occultation as the one in '78... more like the one I described as I watched from the front porch last December:

The crescent moon lifted through a veil of ground fog. It rose slowly over the ridge, then lifted quickly through the sharp branches of bare trees into open sky, brilliance smeared by moist breath of winter hills. Waiting above in its own halo, Venus moved chrome-edged against a brittle sky of deep indigo. Two luminaries star-crossed, met. The Morning Star rested in the cusp of a two-horned silver crescent lifting like a goblet to hold starlight.

Do you remember that the Soviets landed several craft on the surface of Venus back in the seventies? I don't know if I knew this. We didn't hear much about the successes of the USSR back then, did we? Here's an interesting page about the exploration of Venus and what it's surface is like (with images from the Soviet lander) with some good "related pages" at the bottom.