August is known for one of the most spectacular planetary alignments of the year, along with other notable conjunctions and lunar events, including the “six planet parade”.
From August 10 to dawn on August 13, six planets — Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune — will appear in the dawn sky along the eastern horizon. Venus and Jupiter will have a spectacular conjunction on August 12, appearing almost together in the sky, easily visible to the naked eye.
Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, and Saturn will be visible without optical aid; Uranus and Neptune require binoculars or a small telescope. Mars does not join this alignment in August, but the Full Sturgeon Moon will be present during the alignment, adding brightness to the scene.
Why then, can I only entertain childhood thoughts, on an August Sunday, of sad Monday sailboats leaving a rocky cover in sultry heat, and emptying piers on sad, quiet lakes? Of another summer gone — and humanity’s parade back into gray buildings to labor and study (as we must) ?
I must look up to dawn along the eastern horizon and up into the night sky.
And, once again, at August’s absolute end –Labor Day, circa 1960 — I recall the late Joe O’Donnell and I climbing the main Blue Hill for well over an hour on our bikes until suddenly we felt momenum grabbing Joe’s lead bike, then mine, and we went cruising gently for perhaps only a short time –but it felt like a good long rewarding spell — around twisting forest corners without automobiles and down to flat land, and Joe saying to me something like, “that was a great ride, wasn’t it?”
I saw Joe only very periodically in subsequent years — maybe at the subway station, coming from our respective high schools, waiting for the Neponset bus –until the day (at another funeral) that his younger brother told me he had died a few months before. He would have been in his fifties.
Again, my thoughts must be of the horizon, of the infinity of the night sky, of life. Memories are fine, but on our planet, we must stay in the present moment.
The beautiful hill, the horizon, the sky….the present moment on Planet Earth.
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