What to Do at 5am

Plotnik seems to sleep until 5 am. Then a stupid dream wakes him up, and no matter how stupid the dream, he is now awake worrying about It.

So this morning, after he dreamed that his wife was going off with -- well, the idea is beyond believable, in the light of day, and should be equally so in the darkness of the other side of the moon, but there Plotnik was, tossing and turning, thinking "what? With HIM?"

So he got up, walked upstairs, looked out on the deck, then ran back down to get his IPad with the StarWalk App, because a gigantic star was hanging low over the avocado tree.

He pointed the IPad and StarWalk told him he was looking at Venus, huge in the foreground and, above that to the right, Jupiter. The little red dot you can't see here was a satellite called Zazum.

(There were three large moons of an unknown planet visible on the left, but they turned out to be smudges on Plotnik's monitor.)

Conceptually, Plottie is always stumped by this stuff. For starters, we all know Venus is closer to the sun than we are, and Jupiter is way out there on the other side of us. And yet -- here I am, and there those two planets are. How can we be between them?

Well, a little thought clears that up, but how about this: if you forget to power down StarWalk, and you sit it on the kitchen table, it looks through the table and the center of the earth and tells you you are now staring at Pluto and the Sun. Through the kitchen table.

That's too much for 5am.