MENASHA, WI (WTAQ) – Despite all of the ups and downs…and more downs of 2020, the year will be ending with one bright spot. It’s something that many people are dubbing as a ‘Christmas Star’.
While it’ll light up the night sky, it’s not actually a shining star hanging on the highest bough. It’s our solar system’s two largest planets.
“Look to the southwest. There will be a bright object in the sky, you might think it’s a star, you’ll notice it won’t twinkle as much as the other stars. [That’s] because it’s Jupiter. It’s much closer to us and and much brighter,” said Barlow Planetarium Director Alan Peche. “Right next to it, just to the left of it and little bit higher, a little dimmer, is Saturn. Right now if you close one eye and look at Jupiter and Saturn and point to them with your finger, you can barely get one finger between.”
They will be closer than a quarter of a moon diameter. Which means at the peak, normal telescopes at medium magnification will show both planets in the eyepiece at the same time.
“You’ll be looking at the two largest planets in our solar system and all of their moons. These two things have more than 180 moons combined. We’ll see a few of them in the view, the biggest ones we can see with our telescopes…Basically Jupiter is faster than Saturn. So Jupiter laps Saturn every 20 years, but this one when it’s getting lapped is just super, super close. Much closer than it was 20 years ago,” Peche said. “It hasn’t happened for almost 800 years…It will happen again in another 60 years, where they will get this close. And probably at it’s closest approach, they will be so close that your eye will not be able to separate the two.”
Hundreds, if not thousands of years ago, Peche says the two would have looked to be right on top of each other.
“If you were to look at them through a telescope, you would’ve seen Jupiter and you’ve only seen the rings of Saturn poking out behind Jupiter,” Peche said. “They’re not going be that close, but this is super close. When you start getting within a moon diameter it’s very, very impressive.”
But the brightness, and frankly, the timing are creating the ‘Christmas Star’ moniker. Peche says oddly enough, that nickname might not be too far off.
“When we look back at the history, one of the theories was that the star of Bethlehem could have been a conjunction of some planets that got the wise men’s or the magi’s attention,” Peche explained. “At the time when you look at the reports, nobody else seemed to understand that there was this star. But the the people who knew about the sky, the astrologers at the time, knew that this stuff was going on. So it’s one of those things that it’s kind of funny it’s happening on the first day of winter.”
If you’ve been observing the planetary shift, you might notice that the two have been coming closer together every few days. Peche says that means you’re actually watching the solar system move.
The closest ‘double-planet’ convergence is expected on Monday, December 21st.
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