“Moo. Moo. Moo. Moo. Moo. Moooooooon.”

Ethan talks about the moon more than anything. By a pretty wide margin, actually. His mother is waxing concern (see what I did there?) over Ethan’s latest fixation, but I’m confident he’ll grow out of it in eventually. He’s probably going through a phase. (Pause for laughter.) In the meantime, we get hourly requests to go outside to observe the moon, and story book time often consists of skimming through illustrations to point out ones in which the moon is depicted.

The last few weeks have been tough because the moon was in a phase that made it very difficult to observe, rising in the early morning hours and setting some time in the afternoon. But Ethan was in for a treat Monday night. The moon was setting over our backyard and it had some very special company. The silver crescent was paired with the planetary conjunction of Jupiter and Venus. I did my best to photograph the celestial meet-up…

Jupiter is the smaller bright dot at the top left of the frame, with Venus outshining it just below.

Here’s a photo of the conjunction taken by the pros at the Mt. Wilson Observatory down in Los Angeles, courtesy of NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day.

And here are some more photos of the conjunction, taken from around the world.