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Tuesday, December 2, 2008

Conjuction Junction

"Did you see the lights last night?"
or
"Hey, I saw the strangest thing last night"

Questions like that greeted me this morning when I found my way to the pile of papers I call a desk. Being the closest thing in my office to an astronomer I tend to get a lot of questions about the sky and was looking forward to the one I knew were coming regarding the Moon/Venus/Jupiter conjunction. I was even (ok, almost) ready for the, "Those had to be UFOs cause you can't see a planet from the earth!" one. Yes, sadly, that is a quote from an associate who also doesn't understand how an eclipse works because, and again I quote, "The moon can't get between the sun and the earth because the sun and moon are both up in the sky and spin around the earth".



I answered all the questions and while doing so, it struck me that more people came to me asking things then ever before. People had actually stopped and looked up. People had actually done astronomy and began the scientific process by asking a simple question to themselves, "What is that?" What a wonderful thing happened to these folks and they don't even realize it.

I wonder how many of them will continue to take a moment out of their day and just look up? More, I hope, than did before.

2 comments:

NiteSkyGirl said...

if you get tired of the astronomy questions you can throw some my way lol

Greg said...

Sadly, I actually respect you too much to fling the "questions" I get from co-workers your way. They'd want to know what house Gemini was moving into and whether or not they should buy that stock.

:-)