Moon, Jupiter and Mars conjunction

The things parents do for their kids. In my case, I was asked to be a human alarm clock. My son was to take a flight departing the Penang international airport at 8.30am and had wanted me to wake him up at 5.30am. "Don't worry," he assured me, "I have set other alarms to go off at this time too but I need you to be an additional alarm in case my other alarms fail me." Unfortunately, he does not live with his parents in Bukit Mertajam but preferred to stay on his own on the island. So like all good parents, I agreed to give him a telephone call at 5.30am. But first, I had to roll out of bed myself by 5.15am at the latest. 

The problem with me is that after I rouse myself up at this unearthly hour, it is normally impossible for me to go back to my warm bed. What to do under such circumstances? Why, go out and look at the sky, that's what!

The moment I looked eastwards, I was amazed to see the crescent moon to the right of Jupiter. I had forgotten all about this forthcoming conjunction! The wandering moon, getting thinner with each day, would be positioned close enough to Jupiter in the morning of the 25th of May. In addition, with the fainter Mars quite close by, the two planets and the moon formed a tight triangle in the eastern morning sky. Wow, what a sight indeed!

PS. There was a bonus too, When I digitally enhanced my pictures of this conjunction, the four Galilean moons of Jupiter showed up so clearly in a few of them. Io was almost touching the planet itself but not because it was going to fall into Jupiter. It's an optical illusion. A few minutes later, it would be transiting across the face of Jupiter and would be impossible for me to photograph it. So at this very moment, there were five moons and two planets in this picture. 

PS2. Mars and Jupiter would be closest together from our point of view on Sunday morning but it won't be anything as spectacularly bright as the Jupiter-Venus conjunction which was witnessed at dawn on the first of this month. But I hope that I can still wake up on Sunday to watch this natural phenomenon.