Venus and Jupiter are, respectively, the brightest two planets in our night sky. They all orbit the Sun, as we do. Their apparent path as they orbit is called the plane of the ecliptic. You can think of the ecliptic as an imaginary line that the Sun and planets trace through the sky over time.

So why are Jupiter and Venus appearing to close in on each other?

Let’s break this down by planet, and start with Jupiter. Jupiter mostly travels westward if you follow its motion for a while. Jupiter is doing precisely what it is supposed to. The largest of our Solar System’s planets, it is so bright because it is large. Over the next two weeks, Jupiter continues its steady westward proper motion.

Venus, on the other hand, is currently ascending to the East farther every night. This evening apparition of Venus is called “Hesperus,” or the evening star, in Greek mythology. Venus is usually the brightest object in the night sky, except for the moon. When Venus comes up ahead of the Sun in the morning, She becomes the morning star, Phosphorus.

Over the next two weeks, the two bright planets will appear to come ever closer.

In the planetarium, I ask the students, “are they going to collide?” Of course not, and here’s a simple way to show this for yourself. Look through one eye, and put one thumb near your nose. Place the other thumb at arm’s length away from you. Move them so they look like they touch.

Of course, if you’ve done this properly, your thumbs don’t touch, since they’re separated by roughly 24 inches. Venus and Jupiter are in fact separated by over 500 million miles!

The conjunction reaches its peak about 30 minutes after sunset on March 1. These two planets will appear in the same binocular field, and will be hard to separate if you have normal vision. If you take off your eyewear (or put some on) and you see the bright blur in the Southwest, that’s them looking like “one star” in the sky.

Another time that the two planets conjoined and appeared as “one star,” was in the timeframe of nine months between 3 BCE, and 2 BCE. During the nine months between conjunctions, Jupiter did its yearly retrograde loop around Regulus, known as the “King’s Star;” the conjunction would have been astronomically significant to Magi from Persia, as an example.

Retrograde means “going backwards, apparently” and this represents the time when Earth catches up to, then laps Jupiter, causing Jupiter to appear to be making a loop in space. The joining of Venus in this conjunction was interpreted to mean a great king would be born. Was a rare, extremely close conjunction between Venus and Jupiter the “Star of Bethlehem?”

Our next public programs are at 11 a.m. and 1 p.m., on March 11 and a special bilingual program is scheduled for 2 p.m.

We are located on the campus of Hargrave Complex at 100 Hargrave St. in Lumberton.

Our phone number is 910-671-6000, Ext. 3381, or email Joy Ivey, Planetarium Bookkeeper, at [email protected]. Let her know how many are in your group, and which program you want to engage in.

This month’s presentation is “Mars Perseverance rover mission: Two years and Counting!” A guest scientist from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab will be the featured speaker, joining us via zoom.