The Northern Night Sky

Beaver Island joins the likes of the Pitcairn Islands, New Zealand and Montana’s Medicine Rocks as one of the best places in the world to see the stars.

This week is all about hidden mysteries, in the celestial world and in the festival calendar.

Now comes the season of Venus’ greatest altitude, which means the opportunity is at hand for seeing the goddess of love and beauty in broad daylight, while the Sun lingers above the horizon to greet her.

In the woods of northern Michigan the trillium bloom is about to burst forth and everything seems to be in a state of tremulous anticipation, while overhead, the planet Mercury has just made its inferior conjunction with the Sun.

I suppose you could say that because they’re all moving around in the sky above us, the planets are always traveling together, but the history of art and literature reveals that the celestial beloveds are always Venus and Mars, and this week, the Moon builds an ever-brightening bridge of light between them, looking west after sunset.

Venus is so beautiful this week, moving up the sky through the starry region of Taurus, and joining the Pleiades, known as the seven sisters, especially on Tuesday night.

We’ve come to the point in the cycle of the year when the two great lights, Sun and Moon, trade places in the celestial hemispheres.

There are three celestial pairings this week that are worth knowing about, and even though we might not see all of it, this is The Storyteller’s Night Sky, so we can live into these events out of our imaginations.

This week the astrological love omens are on high alert, given that the gracious planet Venus is catching up with expansive Jupiter in the evening sky. We could just say that their meeting on Thursday will make for a great date night, and leave it at that, but I’m interested in the longer narrative.

Forty early mornings. That’s about one and a half Moon cycles, and is regarded as the amount of time it takes to break, or to form, a habit.