The weather has a way of upsetting plans. Not that we shouldn’t be used to it. But it seems like almost every time something interesting happens in the sky, the weather tries to stop us from seeing it.
Today is the winter solstice. The shortest day of the year. But with all that extra darkness, we were going to get a treat. The Great Conjunction. Saturn and Jupiter were going to be so close to each other they would appear almost as one. The gap between them was going to be one tenth of one degree, which is pretty small in astronomic terms.
The two planets are not ignoring any social distancing rules. They are really still going to be just as far apart as the usually are. But they were going to appear along the same line, or close to it. They might look close, but they will still be far enough away they won’t even need face masks.
You may have been catching sight of them getting closer along the southwest lately. It took me a little while to realize I was actually seeing this. I was hearing about it, but it never really clicked that they would be up there in the sky getting closer together over the past few days and weeks. And driving down the 103 after dark on a clear night they were pretty obvious. It wasn’t going to be some sort of secret planetary gathering. And it was looking pretty cool. Tonight was going to be special.
And they don’t do this often. There is a conjunction about every twenty years, just not quite so close. The last time they got this close was in 1623, but they were closer to the sun and harder to see. It would have been in 1226 that people last saw something that looked like what we may have been able to see tonight.
If it wasn’t for the clouds and the fog. At the moment we are lucky if we can see across the street, let alone a few million miles into space. Hopefully, they’ll still be hanging out when the sky clears again. Either that or we have to wait for another six hundred years.
