Great Conjunction

Last evening, December 21, 2020, we all packed in to the Sienna and headed out for a nice, dark park to take a mid-winter’s walk and see the planets Jupiter and Saturn cozy up to each other.

I’ve been watching their progress for a few weeks. One of the nice things about living in the west is the skies, while somewhat polluted by light, are generally better for star watching than they are in larger cities. So, while Obsidian Black Dog sniffs and runs the last of his energy out for the day, I look up and watch the inverted bowl of the sky play out its celestial musica universalis. I think watching the phases of the moon and seeing the wandering points of light we call planets is the best part of dark walking. The artificial satellites are fun, too. And the shooting stars are always a momentary thrill.

But December 21 was to be the “big event”.

So it was that, last evening, all six of us were out in the darkness of the longest night, five us us looking up at two planets some 450 million miles apart and a minimum of 500 million miles away, and one of us chewing on a glow ball in the grass. We saw them nicely coupled up in the SW sky, just a bit west of Mt. Helena. To be honest, I liked them better yesterday when Saturn was situated more above Jupiter and it made Jupiter look like it had an upward facing flare of light. Nevertheless, it was cool to see. To the naked eye, I still saw them as two distinct points of light- but the picture from the iPhone really underscored the idea of a single bright “star”.

Binoculars allowed us to see a couple of the moons of Jupiter, and while we were looking at Cygnus the Swan, we had a beautiful Ursid meteor shoot directly across the area of the sky we were watching. That elicited a few immediate “Ooohhs” from the gang. We also counted three artificial satellites spinning north to south across the sky during our outing.

It was a nice way to end the celestial cycle: clear skies, stars and planets, a half-moon, satellites and meteors and a quick 7 tenths of a mile dark walk with the family.

Nature everyday!

The image above was taken with the iPhone and unaltered. I’m amazed at the quality of image that can be grabbed with a cell phone.