Venus and Jupiter this evening

[TomK]

If you have the opportunity this evening, look to the west-northwest after sunset. You'll see the two brightest planets, Venus and Jupiter, in conjunction, roughly a third of a degree apart. If you have binoculars you should be able to see some of Jupiter's moons as well.

[HereOnThePrimalEdge]

... & I thought they were close together last night!

[rainyjim]

Thanks Tom,

Went out and had a look! Looks great over on Kauai. Wish I had a telescope.

[birdmove]

Thanks, Tom! I did see them. Very cool.


Jon in Keaau/HPP

[TomK]

Glad you guys got to see it. I sat out with my neighbor watching things as the sky darkened, but never convinced myself I could see the moons. By the time it got dark enough the planets were in some high cloud/haze and soon after a brief shower put an end to the observing session.

Talking about neighbors, sometimes astronomers forget about the distances involved in the field, you kind of throw it aside because the physics is generally more interesting. But it's good to think about it every so often. So despite Venus and Jupiter appearing so close in the sky, and they are amongst our nearest neighbors (in cosmic terms, they are our close next door neighbors), Venus is currently about 50 million miles away and Jupiter requires a road trip being about 570 million miles away.

I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out how long it would take to pop over for a chat and a nice cup of tea...

[Guest]

Almost looked as if the planets switched places in the sky? Hard to really tell with the shower of rain that came in, the planets did appear to be in slightly different positions of each other after the rain period. The close to full moon was also impressive tonight.
Tomk your miles away guessing is quite impressive, you were only one million miles off on venus (49) million miles. While Jupiter is approximately 564 million miles away, your guess was only 6,000,000 miles off old chap,(joking). To answer your readers questions? It would take about 4 months to get to Venus, maybe just under 4 years to reach Jupiter if we had space junk that could travel about 20,000 miles an hour.

[TomK]

If only I could walk at 20,000 miles per hour...

[VancouverIslander]

If you can find a way to accelerate at around 1g or even 1m/s^2 for the whole trip, it becomes much much shorter (days rather than months or years) with a much higher maximum velocity. Only one day of around 1/10 of a G acceleration gets you close to 200,000 mph. Unfortunately, finding a fuel and engine system to allow us to do this in space is difficult. If it could be managed, you could make it to Jupiter accelerating half way and decelerating the other half in about 6 days. If you just wanted to make it there really fast and crash into it with tremendous velocity, about 4 days. Not sure what kind of tea they serve there, however.

Just call me Mike

[ElysianWort]

Yes I noticed it last week and Jupiter was to the left of Venus in the Western skyline. Last night Jupiter was to the right of Venus. "The Star of Bethlehem" it's called when they line up. A bit funny to think when Venus is closer to the sun than us and Jupiter is further away. Guess were all just running on big ellipses and eventually it happens. No wonder we're all so loopy.

[Lodestone]

Thanks Tom! I did notice the two and wondered what I was looking at.
ETA:clarity