The moon is reasonably easy to pick in the picture, but the small bright dot in the bottom right is less so. That is Jupiter. On Monday, blessed with clear skies, this was roughly the view I had before Jupiter moved behind the moon.
This I enjoyed for two reasons, the first is that it allowed me to pull out a word that I don't get to use anywhere near enough - syzygy, meaning an alignment of three celestial objects (and also the only word in English that includes three 'y's). The second is simply the sheer beauty and awesome magnitude that is demonstrated.
That got me thinking about whether the terms 'beauty' and 'magnitude' have any inherent meaning about the moon and Jupiter, or even to syzygy, and realised that it was (as the cliche goes) all in the eye of the beholder.
The thing I read the following day, about 3.8 million years of success leading to me also got me thinking, and thus came the blog post. I've said before that I'm writing these stream of consciousness style and although I am going back to fix spelling and grammar and to change wording slightly for clarity, I have been trying not to start these posts with an idea of what is going to be there at the end.
This meant that when I got to the end of yesterday's post I was faced with a conundrum, I had wanted to mention the syzygy (in no small part because of the word itself) of the Earth, moon and Jupiter, but I'd managed to get to the end of the post without doing it. Even though I liked the post and felt that it tied up effectively at the end I was sorely tempted to change it to include some reference to this.
I eventually decided not to because the whole point of stream of consciousness is that this might happen and something better may come from it, and that I should deal with it. Also because it gave me a prompt for another post today.
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