Our reliable naturalist John Bates alerts us to an once-in-a-lifetime sight, coming up on Monday evening, the 21st, just around dusk! That evening, we hope to catch a glimpse of a phenomenon that may have shined as the Star of Bethlehem, 2020 years ago.
John writes, "Jupiter and Saturn, the two largest planets in our solar system, will come so close to each other that they will appear to overlap, creating a kind of “double planet” that has not been visible since March, 1226. (And that date is not a typo.)
The two planets will be 0.1 degrees apart, less than a third of the moon’s width. However, they will be separated by about 450 million miles in space.
Jupiter takes about 12 Earth years to circle the sun compared to Saturn’s 30 years, and while the two actually align in their paths roughly every two decades, given that each track has a slightly different tilt, very close conjunctions like this one are extremely rare.
I look ahead to the weather prediction for Monday afternoon and evening, and right now, sadly, it looks as though the sky may be cloudy when we want to watch. We will keep hoping for clear weather, though, to look for those two dots low in the southwestern sky, any time after sunset at 4:16 pm that evening. (Unlike stars, they will not be twinkling.)
Comments