The evening sky over the Northern Hemisphere handled stars to deception once in a lifetime Monday as the two largest planets in the solar system appeared to meet in celestial alignment called astronomers the “Great Conjunction.”
The rare sight came as a result of a collision near the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn that coincided with the winter solstice on Monday, the shortest day of the year. For those who were able to see the alignment in clear skies, the two frozen gas fields appeared closer and more vibrant – almost like one place of light – than at any time in 800 years.
Jupiter – the brightest and largest of the pair – has been approaching Saturn in the sky for weeks as the two planets orbit the sun, each in its own series of celestial orbits large, said Henry Throop, an astronomer at National Aeronautics and the Space Administration Headquarters in Washington.
“From our vantage point, we will be able to see Jupiter on the inner row, approaching Saturn all month and finally passing on December 21,” Throop said in reported last week.
At the point of assembly, Jupiter and Saturn seemed to be only a tenth of a step apart, roughly equal to a thick dime held at arm’s length. In reality, in fact, the planets remained hundreds of millions of miles apart, according to NASA.
The interconnection of the two planets occurs about once every 20 years. But the last time Jupiter and Saturn came as close to each other in the skies as Monday was in 1623, an alignment that occurred due to daylight and was therefore not visible from most places on Earth.
The last great connection to be seen took place long before telescopes were created, in 1226, halfway through the construction of the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris.
The higher brightness of the two planets as they almost converge in the sky has invited the inevitable speculation of whether they created the “Christmas star” that the New Testament describes how they guided the three wise people to baby Jesus.
But astronaut Billy Teets, acting director of the Dyer Observatory of Vanderbilt University in Brentwood, Tennessee, said the Great Consortium is just one of several possible explanations for biblical wonder.
“I think there’s a lot of debate about what that might be,” Teets told WKRN-TV in Nashville in a recent interview.
Astronauts have suggested that the best way to see a connection on Monday is by looking southwest in an open space about an hour after sunset.
“Large telescopes don’t help that binoculars are large, medium-sized, and even the eyeball is fine to see that they’re right together,” astronomer Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, wrote the email to Reuters.
The next Great Orbit between the two planets – though not close to each other – will come in November 2040. A closer alignment will be similar to Monday in March 2080, McDowell said. with the following close connection 337 years later in August 2417.