Missed Jupiter / Venus conjunction

[230RN]

back on 01 Mar.

Had overriding stressors to deal with.

Checked tonight around 1800 hours, 20-ish+° up in western sky, for 40° N. 105° West (Denver).  Still quite spectacular with Neptune about to set, and the infamous Uranimous all in a line.  Uranimous is up pretty high, about 52°.

Clear skies?

Go look.

Terry, 230RN

[BobR]

My star gazer app (Sky Map) shows Jupiter and Venus together and Uranus the bright spot above. Still kind of neat.

bob

[bedlamite]

Saw it yesterday, only day this week without clouds. Cool, but underwhelming.

[RocketMan]

Stumbled across this conjunction a couple days ago when I was letting the dogs out to do their business.  Just got lucky spotting it through a brief break in the clouds.  Pretty neat.

[MechAg94]

The weather hasn't been good for star gazing lately.  The other night I saw the moon and two planets (could be stars) all close together.  There were enough clouds I couldn't see anything else. 

[230RN]

Of course, this event made me think of the Christmas Star, the Star of Bethlehem.

Snooping revealed:

These same astrologers wouldn’t have had to wait long for an even more striking planetary encounter. Four years later, in the summer of 3 B.C., Jupiter and Venus met in an event that would have looked much like the upcoming "Christmas Star," also referred to as the Great Conjunction of December 2020.

On the morning of August 12 in 3 B.C., Jupiter and Venus would’ve sat just 1/10th a degree apart in the dawn sky. That’s one-fifth the diameter of the Full Moon. (The December 2020 conjunction between Jupiter and Saturn will have an identical separation, albeit in the evening sky.) That wasn’t the end of the show, either. Venus and Jupiter continued their dance over most of the next year before finally appearing to merge into a single star in June.

https://astronomy.com/news/2020/12/the-star-of-bethlehem-can-science-explain-what-it-really-was

The whole article is an easy and entertaining read.  And three years over 2020 is only a 0.14 per cent error, which I think might be attributable to cumulative errors in our orbital calculations.

Terry, 230RN

[Ben]

I didn't know about it beforehand, but spotted it while, like Steve, letting Steve out to do his business. 

It was okay under natural vision, but really stood out under NODs.

[brimic]

I noticed them while walking the dogs one clear evening about a month ago. Now I check them every clear evening, about an hour after sundown, they are getting closer together. They are the two brightest objects in the western sky after sundown.