Mercury and the Moon

I'll be doing a live video chat today at 3:00 p.m. Mountain Time. I'll have a post up around 2:00 with everything you need to participate. For those of you who don't have mountains blocking your western horizon, face west shortly after sunset on May 6. The very thin (only two days old!) crescent Moon will lie very near the planet Mercury, which will be shining at a magnitude of about -0.9. Sky and Telescope online has a nice map and more info. It's not terribly hard to get good pictures of such an event, so give it a try. They might turn out to be very pretty. Also, the usually not-so-great but sometimes excellent Eta Aquarids meteor shower peaks around now, too. See SpaceWeather for details.