Great Conjunction 2020: Jupiter and Saturn to share Christmas kiss
Stargazers will be treated to the spectacular sight of Saturn and Jupiter appearing to kiss in the night sky on Monday.
When the planets align on December 21, in what is known as the Great Conjunction , Jupiter and Saturn will be within 0.1 degrees of each other.
They ll be so close they will look like a single bright star, the Perth Observatory explains.
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Saturn, top, and Jupiter, below, are seen after sunset from Shenandoah National Park, in Virginia. The two planets are drawing closer to each other in the sky as they head towards a great conjunction on December 21, where the two giant planets will appear a tenth of a degree apart.(NASA)
That is suspiciously near to Christmas day. Is there any relation to the Star of Bethlehem?
Funny you should ask. The Star of Bethlehem that guided the three wise men to the place of Jesus Christ’s birth may have been a great conjunction, too. As the Encyclopaedia Britannica explains, several conjunctions occurred “within 10 years of the chronological point now taken as the beginning of the Christian era”.
One of these was a conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn, which in 7BC were within one degree of each other three times in eight months. The Star of Bethlehem could also have been Venus and Jupiter, which in 2BC, “would have appeared to observers in Babylon to have merged just before setting in the general direction of Bethlehem to the west”.
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