Don't miss Mercury, the moon and the Beehive Cluster align in a special August morning sky show

On the left, a star-filled view of the Beehive Cluster (Messier 44) with dozens of bright blue-white stars against a black sky. On the right, a thin crescent moon hangs in a pastel gradient sky at dawn or dusk, with shades of pink, purple, and orange.

Isaac Asimov (1920-1992), a legendary writer of science and science fiction, once noted in "The Solar System and Back," that the planet Mercury is rarely visible when it is truly dark.

"I suspect, in fact," he observed, "that many people today (when the horizon is generally much dirtier and the sky much hazier with the glare of artificial light than it was in centuries past) have never seen Mercury."