On Halloween this year, there was a Harvest moon. And it was amazing.

I was at the beach and the sky was cloudless and that night it was so bright that you could almost literally read by the light of that moon. Because the Harvest moon is one where the moon is closer than normal so even under normal circumstances the full moon can be spectacular, but when it’s close like that: wow!

And then at Christmas this year, we had a conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn. We haven’t had anything that spectacular in 800 years. Specifically, since 1226. Probably even your grandmother wasn’t around then. And it was worth seeing.

And while I’ve thought about astronomy since I was in second grade – seriously- I had never thought that technically our moon is hardly a moon. If you were on Mars or Jupiter, you’d see those planets’ moons as tiny specks in the sky. But what we call our moon is this big hulking thing that demands attention and even respect. So if you were on one of those other planets, you’d more likely view what we have as a binary planet system, where two enormous bodies gently and sometimes not so gently circle each other.

So the lesson I take away from this is that the skies are beautiful. But we have to look. And we have to tear ourselves away from looking at the stuff at eye level and realize that there’s amazing stuff above our heads.