One way to end 2020 strong, stargazers, is with a must-see celestial show. Each evening now through Monday, see the two largest planets in our solar system slide closer to each other until their climactic union on Monday.
That’s when the “great conjunction” of Jupiter and Saturn will see the two merge and appear as one brighter-than-usual union called the “Christmas Star.” Though lesser conjunctions occur roughly every two decades, Monday will be the closest, and therefore the brightest, they will come to each other in eight centuries.
“You’d have to go all the way back to just before dawn on March 4, 1226, to see a closer alignment between these objects visible in the night sky,” said Patrick Hartigan, an astronomer at Rice University in Texas.
It’s also earned another, more romantic name: the “Christmas Kiss.”
The closer to the equator one is, the easier it is to see. In Southeast Asia, look to the southwest sky after sunset tonight and every night until Monday to see the planets growing closer before they dip below the horizon just after 8pm.
For the pedantic reader, we’ll note that of course the planets only appear to be moving closer from our point of view because, yaknow, relativity.
Nonetheless, the two giants on Monday evening will be locked together only 0.1 degree apart, thus forming a “double planet” effect that will shine as a brilliant and bright white orb. Taking place on the Winter Solstice, it’s also the longest night of the year.
“Great conjunctions” of lesser magnitude have occurred every 20 years or so this century, as per NASA, depending on the orbits of Earth, Jupiter, and Saturn.
“Even so, this is the ‘greatest’ great conjunction between Jupiter and Saturn for the next 60 years, with the two planets not appearing this close in the sky until 2080,” the U.S. space agency said.
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