If you take a picture of tonight's Smiley Sky, email us with your images and we will display the best on smh.com.au tomorrow. ______

From soon after 8pm until just before 11pm the planets Venus and Jupiter will stare down from the western sky like two brilliant eyes. Directly below, the crescent moon will form a happy mouth. "I think it will be very spectacular," Sydney Observatory's astronomer, Nick Lomb, said. "The three brightest objects in the night sky will all be in the same patch of the sky." As the night draws on, Dr Lomb predicted, "the smiley face" - with Venus playing the left eye and giant Jupiter the right - "will improve and become a little more compact".

To the superstitious, unusual astronomical apparitions were often seen as omens. While Dr Lomb said he did not believe in such things, he noted that Monday's smiling face will appear on the eve of the next Reserve Bank's meeting at which it will consider interest rates. "There was an upside-down sad face visible on the morning of April 23, 1998," he recalled. That day's Herald was dominated by news of conflict on Australia's waterfront, protests against child-care costs, big rises in bank fees and executions in Rwanda.

Dr Lomb urged people to attempt to photograph tonight's heavenly show, which will not smile on the US or Europe. "It should be very easy to take a photograph with a digital camera and a tripod. Use a one-, two- or three-second exposure and, of course, no flash." However the cosmic cheeriness will be a fleeting affair. Another smiley face will not grin over Australia until the early hours of July 21, 2036.

Sydney Observatory will stay open for tonight's show, allowing people to stare back through telescopes and glimpse Jupiter's moons, Venus's gibbous shape and lunar craters.



For bookings ($15 adults, $10 children), phone 9921 3485.