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Endymion

The most storied about objects in our night sky have a beautiful gathering this week, looking toward the east before sunrise. These objects are the Moon, the star cluster known as the Pleaides, and the brilliant planet Venus.

Starting Monday, July 21st, the waning crescent Moon will sweep below the Pleiades, the seven sisters of ancient Greek lore that are the shoulder region of the constellation Taurus, the Bull.

On Tuesday, July 22nd, the Moon, now slightly thinner, will meet the campfire-orange star Aldebaran, the Bull’s Eye, also found in the constellation Taurus.

And then on Thursday morning, July 24rth, the barest crescent of Moon will appear just to the right of our brilliant morning star, Venus, about whom we could imagine early 19th century poet George Gordon, Lord Byron, was writing when he composed the lines “She walks in beauty, like the night, of cloudless climes and starry skies, and all that’s best of dark and bright meets in her aspect and her eyes, thus mellowed to that tender light which heaven to gaudy day denies.”

English poet Alfred Tennyson refers to the Moon as “our silver sister world”, and John Keats composed his 19th century poem of rhyming couplets entirely to the Moon and her mythic love of the Greek shepherd Endymion. Keats was not entirely pleased with his effort, but the beautiful lines of his Endymion that pulse with the rhythm of waxing and waning Moon still ring with familiarity nearly 200 years after they were first composed. “A thing of beauty is a joy forever,” he wrote. “Its lovely increases, it will never pass into nothingness, but still will keep a bower quiet for us…”

Watch for our silver sister world, the Moon, the Taurean stars, and our morning star,  the planet Venus,  in the pre-dawn skies of the week ahead, and find the link to the poems shared here on the Interlochen Public Radio website.

I'm Mary Stewart Adams, from Emmet County's International Dark Sky Park at the Headlands.

She Walks in Beauty, Lord Byron http://www.bartleby.com/106/173.html

Move Eastward Happy Earth, Alfred Tennyson http://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/tennyson/move_eastward_happy_earth.html

Endymion, by John Keats http://www.bartleby.com/126/32.html