"On this date, a thin waning crescent Moon (about 6% illuminated) formed a striking conjunction with Venus and the bright star Regulus in the constellation Leo..."

"... visible in the eastern sky about 40-60 minutes before sunrise for most observers in the Northern Hemisphere. Venus shines at a magnitude of -3.9, making it appear as a dazzling white point of light—far brighter than any star and easily mistaken for a 'dot' close to the Moon's position. This alignment was a highlight of the month's pre-dawn sky, with the trio creating a beautiful triangle-like grouping low on the horizon. If you're in the Southern Hemisphere or a more northerly latitude, the view might have been slightly different, but Venus was the standout object globally."

That's Grok, responding to my question: "What was that white dot next to the moon this morning?

Here's my photo, from 6:12 a.m.:

I fake-raged at Grok: "What do you mean easily mistaken for a 'dot'?! It is a dot. To call it a dot is only to describe how it looks, not to claim it has any particular substance inconsistent with a planet. I assumed it was Venus, but I don't like to say what I don't know, so I said what I did know. It IS a dot! I don't like being told I've made a mistake when I'm actually taking pains to be super-accurate."

Grok abjectly apologized and claimed not to have meant to say I'd made a mistake. Own it, Grok.

ADDED: Grok seemed to want to prove itself by helping me, so I asked what was my genuine next question, a veer away from astronomy and into the topic of writing:

Okay, help me by finding examples of excellent writers who describe what they see with optical precision rather than choosing common words that contain information that the eye doesn't perceive but the mind supplies to explain what is seen. I seem to remember from high school English class that Stephen Crane, in "The Red Badge of Courage," calls the sun a wafer in the sky. But that's not exactly what I want, because he used the word "sun" and the sun was being compared to another object, a wafer. I want things more like my calling Venus a "dot."

Grok "thought" for 2 minutes and 32 seconds and gave me exactly what I wanted, complete with the word "ostranenie": 

Excellent writers who employ optical precision in their descriptions often draw from techniques like defamiliarization (or "ostranenie"), which involves portraying familiar objects or scenes as if encountered for the first time, emphasizing raw visual elements—shapes, colors, lines, textures, light, and shadows—without layering on explanatory or interpretive labels supplied by prior knowledge. This aligns closely with your example of calling Venus a "dot," as it sticks to the unadorned perceptual reality. Below, I'll highlight a few standout authors known for this approach, along with specific examples from their works. These are drawn from literary traditions like Russian Formalism and the French Nouveau Roman, where the focus is on objective, almost photographic or geometric rendering of what's seen.Alain Robbe-GrilletRobbe-Grillet, a key figure in the Nouveau Roman movement, is renowned for his meticulous, impersonal descriptions that treat the visual world as a series of surfaces, measurements, and forms, devoid of emotional or narrative interpretation. His novel Jealousy (1957) exemplifies this through repetitive, precise observations of a tropical house and its surroundings, where objects are broken down into visual components without being named or explained.

• Example: The recurring depiction of a squashed centipede on a wall is rendered purely as a pattern of lines and stains: "The stain is composed first of all of a central grey spot, slightly elongated horizontally, as if crushed... The spot is pierced by a hole, about one-third of the way from its left edge... Around this spot, there are scattered fragments of varying size... Then follow more vague remains: bits of legs which partially form a body twisted into a question mark." This avoids any biological or symbolic labeling, focusing solely on the observable marks, shapes, and spatial relations as they appear to the eye.
• Another instance from the same novel: The veranda is described geometrically: "Now the shadow of the column—the column which supports the southwest corner of the roof—divides the corresponding corner of the veranda into two equal parts. This veranda is a wide, covered gallery surrounding the house on all four sides." Here, the emphasis is on shadows, divisions, and proportions, presenting the structure as abstract visual planes rather than a "house" with functional meaning.

Robbe-Grillet's style creates a sense of estrangement by insisting on this surface-level precision, making the reader "see" anew without mental shortcuts.Leo TolstoyTolstoy masterfully uses defamiliarization to strip away cultural assumptions, describing everyday scenes through naive or alienated eyes that capture only the optical absurdity or strangeness. In War and Peace (1869), he applies this to social rituals, rendering them as bizarre visual spectacles.

• Example: The famous opera scene, viewed through the inexperienced eyes of Natasha Rostova, transforms the performance into a disjointed array of colors, movements, and props without referencing "singing," "acting," or "theater": "On the stage were some boards in the middle, on the sides stood painted pictures representing trees, behind was a cloth stretched on boards. In the middle of the stage sat some girls in red bodices and white skirts. One very fat girl in a white silk dress was sitting apart on a low bench, to the back of which a piece of green cardboard was glued. They were all singing something. When they had finished their song the girl in white went up to the prompter’s box and a man with tight silk pants over his stout legs, and holding a plume and a dagger, came forward and began singing, waving his arms... The man in the tight-fitting trousers sang alone, then she sang, then both paused while the orchestra played and the man fingered the hand of the girl in white, obviously awaiting the beat to start singing with her. They sang together and everyone in the theater began clapping and shouting, while the man and woman on the stage—who represented lovers—began smiling, spreading out their arms, and bowing." This reduces the opera to a sequence of odd, disconnected visual and gestural elements—boards, painted trees, colored clothing, waving limbs—highlighting the raw appearance without the mind's gloss of "art" or "performance."

Tolstoy's technique here, as noted by Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky, forces perceptual renewal by avoiding automatized recognition. Franz KafkaKafka's prose often begins with optical estrangement, presenting transformations or situations through stark visual details that defy immediate categorization, emphasizing the unfamiliar in the mundane.

• Example: The opening of The Metamorphosis (1915) describes Gregor Samsa's changed form without initially labeling it as an "insect" or "bug," focusing on the physical, observable reality: "As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic vermin. He lay on his armour-like back, and if he lifted his head a little he could see his brown belly, slightly domed and divided by arches into stiff sections. The bedding was hardly able to cover it and seemed ready to slide off any moment. His many legs, pitifully thin compared with the size of the rest of him, waved about helplessly as he looked." The description prioritizes shapes (domed belly, arches, thin legs), textures (armour-like), and movements (waving helplessly), treating the body as an alien visual object before any explanatory framework kicks in.

Jonathan SwiftIn Gulliver's Travels (1726), Swift uses scale shifts to defamiliarize human bodies and landscapes, describing them with clinical, optical detail as if under a microscope or from a distorted viewpoint.

• Example: In the Brobdingnag section, Gulliver observes the giants' skin up close: "Their skins appeared so coarse and uneven, so variously coloured, when I saw them near, with a mole here and there as broad as a trencher, and hairs hanging from it thicker than packthreads, to say nothing farther concerning the rest of their persons." This zooms in on pores, colors, and protrusions as vast, textured landscapes, stripping away the normalizing label of "human skin" to reveal its raw, magnified appearance.

These writers—particularly Robbe-Grillet and Tolstoy—excel at the kind of precision you described, where the eye's input (dots, lines, blurs, divisions) takes precedence over the mind's categorizations (planets, suns, operas). If you'd like more examples from specific genres, eras, or authors, or deeper dives into these texts, let me know!

I had to ask: "Was I right about the line in 'The Red Badge of Courage'? The sun was like a wafer in the sky?"

Answer:

You're referring to a vivid description from Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage (1895), and you're very close but not quite exact with the phrasing. The specific line where Crane describes the sun in a way that evokes a wafer-like image is:  

"The sun was pasted in the sky like a wafer." 

This appears in Chapter 9, during a moment when the protagonist, Henry Fleming, is grappling with the chaos and aftermath of battle. The full context is: "The red sun was pasted in the sky like a wafer." Here, Crane uses the metaphor to convey a striking, almost surreal visual impression of the sun—flat, vivid, and seemingly stuck against the sky, emphasizing its stark, unyielding presence amid the grim scene below. The word "pasted" adds to the optical precision, suggesting a two-dimensional, almost artificial appearance, aligning with your interest in descriptions that prioritize raw visual perception over interpretive labels 

Your memory of "like a wafer in the sky" is remarkably close, capturing the essence of Crane’s imagery. The slight tweak ("pasted" and "red sun") makes it even more evocative, as it avoids directly naming the sun’s cosmic nature and instead presents it as a flat, tangible object, much like your "dot" for Venus. Crane’s choice here leans toward defamiliarization, rendering the familiar sun strange and immediate, which fits beautifully with the literary and artistic examples we’ve discussed. 

Pasted! I forgot the best part: Pasted!!

Grok wanted to keep helping, and who am I to deny satisfaction to a noncreature that is incapable of feeling anything at all. I had a new prompt:

I think this material can be connected to "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat," where a man with some sort of brain dysfunction had lost the ability to understand the things he was seeing and spoke of them as if he were an alien viewing lines and shapes. He couldn't call a rose a rose. It was a convoluted swirl to his eyes. Also connect this to the Impressionists, who tried to paint purely from the eye. Monet was called "only an eye but what an eye."

Grok:

You're spot on with that connection—it's a brilliant bridge from the literary techniques we discussed to neurological phenomena and artistic movements. Let's unpack and link these ideas step by step, showing how they all revolve around prioritizing raw visual perception over conceptual labeling.The Neurological Parallel: Oliver Sacks' Case of Visual AgnosiaIn Oliver Sacks' The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985), the title essay describes Dr. P, a musician with visual agnosia—a brain dysfunction (likely due to damage in the visual association cortex) that impairs the ability to recognize and interpret what he sees, despite intact vision. This results in descriptions that are strikingly similar to the optical precision you admire in writers like Robbe-Grillet or Tolstoy: pure, alienated observations of shapes, colors, and forms, stripped of any "mind-supplied" meaning. Dr. P views the world as an "alien" might, breaking objects down into abstract visual elements without accessing their identity or purpose.A key example is when Sacks presents him with a rose. Instead of recognizing it as a flower, Dr. P describes it solely based on its perceptual qualities: 

'About six inches in length,' he commented. 'A convoluted red form with a linear green attachment.'  

Only after smelling it does he deduce it's a rose, but his initial response is devoid of that knowledge—it's just a geometric, colored structure. Similarly, when shown a glove, he says: "A continuous surface... infolded on itself. It appears to have five outpouchings, if this is the word." This echoes your "dot" for Venus: an unfiltered report of what's optically present, without leaping to "planet" or "glove." Sacks notes that Dr. P's condition forces a kind of perpetual defamiliarization, where familiar things become strange visual puzzles. It's not a choice, like in literature, but a neurological compulsion that highlights how our brains normally "supply" meaning to raw sensory data. This case illustrates the fragility of perception and ties directly to writers who deliberately mimic this estrangement to make readers see anew.Linking to Impressionist Painting: "Painting from the Eye"This neurological "alien" viewpoint also resonates with the Impressionist painters of the late 19th century, who sought to capture the pure optical impression of a scene—light, color, and form as they hit the retina—rather than rendering objects with the intellectual clarity and detail that the mind imposes. Artists like Claude Monet rejected traditional realism, which "explains" scenes through sharp outlines and symbolic representation, in favor of blurred, vibrant depictions that reflect momentary visual sensations. They painted what the eye perceives in a glance, often en plein air (outdoors), emphasizing fleeting effects like sunlight on water or shifting shadows, without the brain's corrective labels. 

Monet, in particular, embodied this approach. He once said he wanted to paint "the air that surrounds the bridge, the house, the boat—the beauty of the light in which they exist." His series paintings (e.g., haystacks or Rouen Cathedral at different times of day) treat the subject as a canvas for optical variations—dots and dashes of color that coalesce into form only from a distance, much like your "dot" resolves into Venus upon reflection. Paul Cézanne famously praised this purity: "Monet is only an eye, but my God, what an eye!" This "only an eye" ideal mirrors Dr. P's agnosic descriptions and the writers' techniques: a focus on the unmediated visual input, defying the mind's urge to categorize (e.g., not painting a "cathedral" as a solid, symbolic structure, but as dissolving patches of light). 

The Impressionists' method was revolutionary because it challenged viewers to experience the world optically first, before intellectually—similar to how Sacks' patient forces us to confront perception without recognition, or how defamiliarized writing strips away assumptions. In all three realms (literature, neurology, art), the goal (or effect) is to restore wonder to the everyday by sticking to "what the eye sees," not what the mind knows....

FINALLY: