See Venus and Jupiter in January and February
Jupiter (left) and Venus (right) in 2002. (Photo: NASA)
Friday, January 25, 2008
The planets Venus and Jupiter are near each other before dawn in late January and early February, 2008.
Start looking for them now and watch them in the weeks to come. Venus and Jupiter are the sky’s two brightest planets. They look like blazingly bright stars, rising in the east a couple hours before the sun, and sitting near your southeastern horizon before sunrise. The brighter and higher-up object is Venus. The fainter object – closer to the horizon – is Jupiter.
Venus and Jupiter are the 3rd and 4th brightest heavenly bodies, after the sun and the moon. Each morning in late January, Venus and Jupiter will appear closer together in predawn sky.
On Friday, February 1 they’ll be at their closest – in conjunction, as astronomers say, on our sky’s dome. The February 1 Venus-Jupiter conjunction will be the closest conjunction of any two planets in the morning sky for all of 2008. A similarly close morning pairing of these two brightest planets won’t happen again until 2011. Of course, Venus and Jupiter aren’t really close together now or ever.
They just look that way as seen from Earth now, because they’re located along a single line of sight in space. In reality, Jupiter orbits about 7 times farther from the sun than Venus. We’re Earth & Sky, a clear voice for science.
