The moon won't quite be smiling: Here's how reality compares to the social meme

Social media has been abuzz this week about an event Friday morning before sunrise. The Moon will pass near Venus and Saturn.

2025-04-24

It will look pretty cool, but not that cool.

In reality, Venus and Jupiter wont be close enough to each other or the Moon to match the images you have been seeing online.

When and where to look

The Moon rises in the east just after 5 a.m. The best time to look will be during nautical twilight between 5:30 and 6:30 am. The trio will be a higher above the horizon and a bit easier to see. By the beginning of civil twilight around 6:30 a.m. Saturn will be lost in the increasing sunlight.

If your eastern horizon is clear enough, and dark enough, you might just be able to make out tiny Mercury dotting the chin.

So where are these claims coming from?

The images shared online look more like the iconic yellow smiley face, created in 1946 by State Mutual Life Assurance Company graphic designer Harvey Ball to boost employee morale, are more arrt that science.

The view will also be remarkably different across the globe.

The Moon, Venus, and Saturn will be closer to equally spaced for observers in Carribbeam, but still with a tiny smile and a very dim right eye. Much closer Venus outshines Saturn.

By moonrise here on the east coast, that nearly perfect triangle of Moon-Venus-Saturn has stretched to the tiny smile with more distant eyes above.

This is because the Moon moves remarkably fast through the sky, sliding about little more than 13 degrees westward each day in its month long 360 degrees journey around the Earth .

Seeing faces

There’s likely some pareidolia at play here as well—the human tendency to perceive familiar patterns, especially faces, in everyday objects.

Pareidolia drives our brain to tells us a cloud looks like an animal or we see constallations in the stars. It also drove front page stories in 1970s supermarket tabloids about a “face on Mars" seen by NASA's Viking mission.

When the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter revisited the site, the “eyes” and “mouth” in the nearly 30-year-old image were shown to be shadows cast by ridges along the weathered mesa in the Mars' Cydonia region.