January 31st, 2017, 6:10 p.m. local time
As I stepped off my evening train, I could see, despite clouds and the glare of a station parking lot, the Moon and Venus poking through the sky. They are the only two objects that could penetrate this muck! Better, tonight they were on the same horizontal plane in the Southwest sky. The Moon is about five degrees off the Solar System’s elliptic path, and my guess was that these two residents of said Solar System were approximately that far apart, maybe a tad closer than this outer boundary. But at least I now have a rough approximation of the Moon’s orbit relative to the plane the planets reside.
The Moon was to the East/left and a waxing thin crescent. Venus was to the West/right of the Moon.
Update: This confirms what I saw tonight, as well as my approximations (from Sky & Telescope January 31, 2017):
https://skyandtelescope.org/observing/this-weeks-sky-at-a-glance-january-27-february-4
