Get ready for the great Venus and Jupiter conjunction [View all]

[pokerfan]

Keep looking up!

The first two stars to pop out after sunset are no true stars at all – but the dazzling planets Venus and Jupiter. Look westward at dusk and you can’t miss this pair of brilliant beauties. Venus and Jupiter blaze as the third-brightest and fourth-brightest celestial bodies, respectively, after the sun and moon.

This next week provides a wonderful opportunity to see why the Greek word planet means wanderer. Whereas stars appear fixed – like dots in a connect-the-dots book – the planets wander in front of the background stars, and relative to one another.

Starting this evening, watch these two brilliant worlds race along the ecliptic – the great planetary racetrack circling through the constellations of the zodiac. Both of these worlds presently reside in the constellation Aries. Both are traveling eastward along the ecliptic and heading for the Pleiades star cluster in the constellation Taurus.



http://earthsky.org/tonight/get-ready-for-the-great-venusjupiter-conjunction