It is worth setting your alarm clock to get you up approximately ninety minutes before sunrise if the local weather prediction indicates that Friday morning, the start of the Memorial Day Holiday Weekend, will be fair and clear. A beautiful combination of the two brightest objects in the night sky can be seen if you go outside at that early hour and have a clear, unhindered view towards the east.
The crescent moon will be visible right away; it will appear thin and silvery, with only 16 percent of its disc being lighted by sunlight. And Venus, a magnificent silvery-white celestial lantern of magnitude -4.5, will hover to the bottom left of the lunar crescent. The distance between the two items will be quite large—about 7 degrees, or almost three-quarters of the apparent width of your fist held at arm’s length.
Although these two objects won’t be coming very close together, their immense brightness makes them a striking sight in the early morning sky.What we are witnessing is, of course, a perspective illusion. Venus is 259 times farther away from Earth on this morning at 58.5 million miles (94.1 million km), whereas the moon is 225,700 miles (363,300 km). On June 1, Venus will reach its maximum western elongation, or its maximum angular separation from the sun. However, throughout the first half of the summer, it will gradually rise in the eastern morning sky. By the third week of July, it will have risen to three hours ahead of the sun, up from little under two hours now.