The Perseid Meteor Shower comes to its peak overnight Tuesday this week, when the Earth passes through the tail of the comet that causes the shower and the constellation Perseus reaches its highest place in the night sky. But the Moon will be a waning gibbous, 84 percent illuminated, rising in the East the night before the peak and not setting until after sunrise the following morning. The Moon will be among the stars of Pisces, a companion constellation and just south of Perseus.
But despite the moon glow, there’s so much story in this particular sky!
Tuesday morning, August 12th, Venus and Jupiter will be spectacularly close, looking east an hour before sunrise. They’re among the stars of Gemini, but those stars won’t be visible unless you look much earlier, around 4 am. Mercury will join them for a short bit, having just resumed direct motion after several weeks of retrograde.
Here’s the stuff of great love stories, and perhaps one of the greatest of all: Dante and his Beatrice. Theirs was not an unrequited, temporal love, but one about which Dante proclaimed: Here is a god stronger than I, who shall rule over me; Now (my) bliss has appeared; from now on I shall be hindered often.
After descending into the bowels of the Earth with Virgil and up the slopes of the Mountain of Purgatory in his Divine Comedy, Dante attains the earthly paradise, and there encounters the eternal beloved, Beatrice. After the various rites of initiation that befall him here, including taking a draft from the river of forgetfulness, and being baptized in the waters of good remembrance, he sees Beatrice, announced with all the majesty of the Archangel Gabriel announcing the Christ Child to Mary. Together they begin their ascent through the planetary spheres and on to the Paradise. Dante the poet uses as context all the available astronomy knowledge of his day, weaving it seamlessly into the stages of human becoming through the spheres.
It was the early 1300s, two centuries before Copernicus set the Earth in motion with his ideas on planetary orbits, forever scattering our paths to the stars.
In Canto XXII of the Paradise, Dante and Beatrice ascend from the region of the planets to the realm of the fixed stars. They do this at the region of Gemini, which is where Jupiter and Venus are, right now. It’s easy to imagine this morning sky scene as the very one Dante took for his inspiration, reaching with an eternal beauty through the centuries. Virgil, Dante’s guide and poetic inspirator, wrote his epic of The Aeneid 14 centuries before Dante, about the classical Greek hero Aeneas, who was the offspring of Aphrodite and the mortal Anchises. Their romantic coupling instigated by Zeus. Aphrodite and Zeus are Venus and Jupiter, rhythmically sounding their story in the morning sky, rendered in human consciousness from the ancient Greeks to the pre-Christian Romans, through the Middle Ages, and visible now, as the Moon wanes through the night, and as the meteors leave their shining furrows.
Dante was born when the Sun moved through Gemini stars, where he and Beatrice mount up to the stars, and where Jupiter and Venus are meeting each morning this week, and especially Tuesday an hour before dawn. Here is the place where the paths of the planets cross the river of the Milky Way, a place immortalized and memorized by the poets of the ages, as Dante described:
In that book which is my memory, on the first page of the chapter that is the day when I first met you, appear the words: ‘Here begins a new life.’
