This past Saturday evening, as I was driving west across the bridge over the Tennessee River that connects Lenoir City and Loudon — en route to Jay and Ashley’s place to drop off Robbie for the weekend, so Becky and I could go to the rodeo in Nashville — I was met with a truly beautiful sight: a very slender crescent Moon, dead ahead on the western horizon. It was an orange-ish color, quite low in the sky, and very striking. Of course, I couldn’t take a picture because I was driving, but I made a mental note of the time, 9:40 PM, so I could check later how “young” it was (i.e., how far away from the New Moon). Turns out, it was just 46 hours and 27 minutes “old,” making it the third-”youngest” Moon that I have (to my knowledge) ever seen, just 10 minutes older than the 46:17 one pictured here (though nowhere near as “young” as the 31:19 one pictured here).

About 24 hours later, en route back from Nashville on Sunday, I noticed the Moon in the western sky again. It was, of course, not as slender of a crescent anymore, being almost 72 hours old. But the view was again striking, for a different reason: the Moon was now quite close to Venus in the night sky. Not super-close, but close enough to make you take notice and stare for a minute. Venus was above and to the left of the Moon; in other words, the Moon was closer to the horizon. Again, I was unable to take a picture because I was in a moving car, and the opportunity didn’t present itself when we were stopped.

Still another 24 hours later, on Monday evening, I was finally able to get a shot of the lovely celestial pair, from the parking lot of West Town Mall after going to the Apple Store:

By this point, the Moon was almost 96 hours old — more than halfway to first quarter — and it was Venus that was closer to the horizon, as you can see.

The relative positions of the two objects on the two nights got me thinking: to get from where it had been (relative to Venus) on Sunday night to where it was on Monday night, it seemed like the Moon would have had to pass directly in front of Venus — an occultation. This would have had to happen sometime earlier Monday, when the Moon wasn’t visible from the United States. But had such an event actually occurred? I hadn’t heard anything about an occultation coming up, but based on my hunch, I went to SpaceWeather.com, and sure enough:

Those are all photos of the tail end of the occultation, from SpaceWeather.com’s gallery, taken by Mohamad Soltanolkotabi (in Iran), Helmut Groell (in Germany) and Alberto Dalle Donne (in Italy), respectively. The four Donne images show Venus’s emergence from the Moon’s eastern limb.

The lunar occultation of Venus was visible from most of Europe and the Middle East, as illustrated by this map:

In the areas between the dotted lines, the occultation was visible during daylight; between the red lines, it was visible in twilight; and between the white lines, it was visible in nighttime. I’m not sure how Groell’s background sky is so dark, if he really took the photo from Germany! But I understand the sky darkness of Soltanolkotabi’s photos, taken from Esfahan, Iran, including this gorgeous shot of the Moon and just-occulted Venus, framed by the Jaame Abbasi mosque and looking rather, well, Islamic:

Awesome stuff.

Almost as awesome: the Galactic Empire has arrived! Heh.