It is a good morning exercise for a research scientist to discard a pet hypothesis every day before breakfast. It keeps him young.
Konrad Lorenz
Last night I had dinner with a well known and very bright Los Alamos scientist. When we stepped out of the restaurant, I spotted something I had never seen before – a very bright stationary object next to the nearly full moon. I knew immediately it wasn’t a planet, because the only planet that bright is Venus – which orbits inside the Earth’s orbit and is always on the opposite side of the sky from a full moon.
When Venus appears to be next to the moon, it looks like this.
I pointed it out to the scientist, who repeatedly insisted it had to be a planet. I keep track of the planets and knew that there weren’t any planets anywhere close to the moon last night. He refused to consider the possibility that he could be wrong, so I pulled out my Canon sx720 pocket camera and photographed it.
It turned out to be a very large high altitude balloon.
