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Credit & Copyright: Jay Ouellet
Explanation:
That's not the young crescent Moon
poised above the western horizon at sunset.
Instead it's Venus in
a crescent phase, captured with a
long telephoto lens from Quebec City, Canada,
planet Earth on a chilly December 30th evening.
The very bright celestial beacon is droping lower into the
evening twilight every day.
But it also grows larger in apparent size and becomes a
steadily
thinner crescent in binocular views as it heads toward an
inferior conjunction, positioned between
the Earth and the Sun on January 11.
The next
few evenings will see a young crescent Moon
join the crescent Venus in the western twilight, though.
Historically,
the first observations of the phases of Venus were made
by Galileo
with his telescope in 1610, evidence consistent with
the Copernican model of the Solar System, but not the
Ptolemaic system.
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NASA Official: Jay Norris. Specific rights apply.
A service of: LHEA at NASA / GSFC
& Michigan Tech. U.
Based on Astronomy Picture
Of the Day
Publications with keywords: Venus
Publications with words: Venus
See also: