The former Philippine Episcopal Church

Venus at an extremely bright magnitude –4.7, in Taurus, is blazing the highest and brightest it ever appears in its 8-year cycle. It comes into easy view high in the west right after sunset, and doesn't set in the northwest until midnight.

Look high to Venus's upper right at dusk for Capella, to its lower left for Aldebaran, and farther to its lower right for the Pleiades. Far beneath Venus, Jupiter is sinking into the sunset.

Cappella is the brightest star in Auriga, which as far as I know is the only constellation named after a local guest house. Aldebaran is the blood red eye of the bull in Taurus, and the less said about the Pleiades the better.

Mars is due south at 9pm paired with Regulus, which is the brightest star in Leo which couldn’t look less like a Lion if it tried. In fact it doesn’t look like anything at all. Now as a species we are notoriously good at pattern recognition, why only 3 weeks ago someone spotted Jesus’ face on the back of a sting ray, I’ve put the picture on the blog, but Leo doesn’t look like anything except Doctor Who’s dog K9, which I always hated incidentally.

Saturn which is in the SE at sunset is similarly paired with Spica which is the brightest star in Virgo, which looks more like a maiden than Leo looks like a lion, but a maiden with a disproportionately large head and a matchstick body.

Mercury almost lost in the sun, and makes a very poor very swift appearance a few minutes before dawn.

The Lyrid meteors are past their peak now but there may still be some poking about in the Northeast after midnight. I didn’t see one, but as I’ve said before I have the same relationship with meteors as the bloke in the kit kat commercial has with panda’s, and don’t get me started on panda’s, suffice to say if any animal deserves to become extinct it’s pandas.

And that was your night sky for the week ending on the 22nd anniversary of The former Philippine Episcopal Church (supervised by the Episcopal Church of the United States of America) being granted full autonomy and raised to the status of an Autocephalous Anglican Province and renamed the Episcopal Church of the Philippines.