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An amateur astrophotographer captured a stunning image of the “Grand Conjunction” of Jupiter and Saturn on Monday night (December 21), revealing the giant of the solar system and its moons just a finger away (from our perspective) from Saturn. , whose rings are surprisingly clear in the night sky.
Although the image was captured with a camera attached to a telescope, to the naked eye the duo of planets looked almost like a single bright star in the sky, also known as the Christmas Star.
But the conjunction, which brought the giant planets in Earth’s night sky closer than they had appeared in 800 years, did not actually involve the two overlapping planets. At their closest point, they appeared only 0.1 degrees away in the sky. That’s close, but far enough away to resolve the two planets through a telescope, as the image below from South Carolina meteorologist Ed Piotrowski demonstrates.
The #GreatConjunction of #Jupiter and #Saturn through my telescope just after 6 pm Jupiter’s moons 4; Europa, Ganymede, Io and Callisto, and Saturn’s moon Titan visible. Stacked many images for clarity and color. Nexstar Celestron 6SE with Nikon D750 attached. #scwx #ncwx pic.twitter.com/vzP2IAuFnSDecember 22, 2020
That is Saturn visible with rings on the right side of the image and Jupiter on the left. Jupiter’s four largest moons form a line across the planet, with Europa at the bottom, Ganymede next on the line, then Io and Callisto. Saturn’s moon Titan is even visible.
All of these features are visible with a consumer telescope: Piotrowski used a Nexstar Celestron 6SE with a Nikon D750 attached, but no human being saw Jupiter and Saturn as anything other than points of light until Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei turned his telescope toward the sky in 1609. and saw those four moons and a year later the rings of Saturn. Titan was not seen until 1655, when the Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens noticed it through his viewfinder.
Related: The 12 strangest objects in the universe
Saturn and Jupiter were not especially close together during the conjunction. As Piotrowski pointed out, Jupiter is currently about 550 million miles (890 million kilometers) from Earth, or about 5.9 times the distance from Earth to the sun. Saturn is about 1 billion miles (1.6 billion kilometers) from Earth, or about 10.8 times the distance from Earth to the sun. In relation to each other, the planets were separated by a whopping 450 million miles (724 million kilometers).
They appeared close together from Earth due to a coincidence: Jupiter’s orbit brought it almost exactly to the line between Earth and Saturn. From Jupiter’s perspective, there would have been no conjunction. And an observer on Saturn would have seen a great conjunction of Earth and Jupiter.
Originally posted on Live Science.
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