Wednesday, July 1, 2015
Venus-Jupiter Conjunction Tonight...Look Westward After Sunset
Yesterday evening at 9:30 while at work, I went out on my "lunch" break to my car. As I looked in the sky toward the west-northwest, a little above the horizon, I saw two bright star-like objects very close to each other. These "stars" are nothing less than the two planets Venus and Jupiter, with Venus being the brighter of the two. This closeness of our celestial neighbors from the perspective of Earth, in astronomical terms called a "conjunction", will be visible tonight as well, weather cooperating. If I'm not mistaken, they are positioned in the faint constellation Cancer. And should you want to add another planet, Saturn, to your sky-gazing experience, look southward toward the constellation Scorpius (representing a scorpion). Just west of the "claw" lies the ringed planet...or, should I say, one of the ringed planets, now that astronomers have discovered them around Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune as well. By the way, the brightest star in that constellation, Antares, is a red giant that would engulf the Earth were it in our Sun's position...