Winter Solstice - Haiku

This Winter Solstice •

Shortest day and longest night • 

Of the darkest year

This winter solstice will also mark the great conjunction when Jupiter and Saturn will be conspicuous in the western sky just after sunset and will be only 0.1 degree apart at the exact moment of the conjunction. Astronomers use the word conjunction to describe meetings of planets and other objects on our sky’s dome. They use the term great conjunction to describe meetings of Jupiter and Saturn, which are the two biggest worlds in our solar system. Though the two planets will appear spectacularly close together on the sky’s dome now, Jupiter and Saturn are actually 456 million miles (734,000 million km) apart. Saturn is nearly twice as far away as Jupiter.

Jupiter-Saturn conjunctions happen every 20 years; the last one was in the year 2000. But these conjunctions aren’t all equal. The 2020 great conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn will be the closest since 1623 and the closest observable since 1226! 2020’s extra-close Jupiter-Saturn conjunction won’t be matched again until the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction of March 15, 2080.
Source: EarthSky.org