Moon over Venus

Last evening, a crescent moon gleamed in the southwest sky, its southern point tipped toward the horizon. Below the moon was Venus, its position suggesting a bright ornament hanging from and tilting its larger companion. This, of course, was an illusion, a product of my vantage point and the distance of those heavenly bodies from Earth. In fact, Venus has a diameter of 7521 miles, more than three times that of the moon; however, at its closest approach, Venus is 25 million miles from Earth, more than 1000 times the distance from Earth to the moon.

Such astronomical illusions have confused humans since our earliest days, leading us to see relationships among the stars and planets that don't actually exist. Indeed, many of the named constellations consist of stars that are farther from one another than each is from the Earth; their grouping in the night sky is merely a consequence of our own location in space. For astrologists or other pseudo-scientists to make predictions based upon the relative positions of certain planets and constellations is thus pure folly.

Of course, man's history of misinterpreting nature extends well beyond the night sky. Before the scientific era, assumptions were made that, today, seem to be remarkably naive, if not comical. Then again, even our modern understanding of nature's complexity, from atoms to ecosystems, continues to evolve and, centuries from now, our perspective will have changed dramatically. Science is, after all, a process and a healthy degree of skepticism is essential to its advance.