The rewards of insomnia

It's worth being awake at four in the morning (on a clear night like this) to see the eastern sky. The waning crescent moon is roughly in line with Castor, Pollux and Venus, with Saturn off to the right. I tried to photograph this, but my digital camera doesn't have a good enough zoom (nor an adequate control of that which we used to call "shutter speed" and "aperture", for that matter).

This is the first time in my life that I have knowingly seen Venus. It is by far the brightest object in the sky (except the moon), a clear blue/white light; Saturn is much less bright.

While writing this, I spent some twenty minutes online, searching through Google's pick of "astronomy+tonight" to get names & descriptions. The best descriptions are on Skywatcher's Diary, but it's text-only. I gave up without finding any site that posted pictures of the sky tonight, surely a wide-open market for somebody. Earth and Sky gave me almost exactly what I wanted: A graphic showing the moon in line with the big bright blob of Venus, and Saturn off to the side.

I wish I had a decent camera, this alignment is really spectactular. I encourage you all to get up early tomorrow to see it. The planets are moving away from each other & the moon, this compound image will not last long.

Just had another look, half an hour after I started, and was surprised how far the sky has turned in this relatively short time. One of these days, I'll get a good camera and set it up to take a photo every five minutes through the night, and assemble the pictures to a movie that will be of no interest to anyone but myself.