Jupiter (lower) and Saturn as viewed through a 55mm lens in the evening of December 10th, 2020
Last month, December 2020, Jupiter and Saturn came together in the sky. Here are my pictures of the event.
On December 21st, 2020, Jupiter and Saturn came within a tenth of a degree (6’; six arcminutes) of each other, forming a great conjunction. It wasn’t like – Surprise! They’re right next to each other! They were slowly aligning for months. It’s a neat astronomical event where the planets look like they’re close in the sky from our angle on Earth. What didn’t happen was someone leaping onto a giant floating crystal and unite it with a shard (unless it did, I wasn’t really in the chamber at the time to witness).
I took the pictures with a 500mm lens, fixed aperture at f/6.3 with manual focusing and no tracking/slewing ability on a tripod with no remote shutter release – so if you think “why they don’t look super sharp or clear?”, that’s why. The angle of view of this lens is 4.1° in the horizontal and 2.7° vertical. Pictures were taken at the largest size my camera could do, then I cropped them all to the same size – so the angle of view in these cropped photos are 1.63° in either dimension.
With that in mind, here is every shot I took for every clear night of December (all in the evening right after sunset).
December 10th, 2020. Jupiter is the lower planet. Angle of separation, 1.72°
December 18th, 2020. Angle of separation, 0.46° (≈0°28’)
December 27th, 2020. Saturn is now the lower one. Angle of separation, 1.00°
December 29th, 2020. Angle of separation, 1.33° Planets are getting low in the sky and into the trees.
But wait! That was only four pictures! That’s right, one picture for every clear night of December! It was a rather cloudy month, so I missed the actual conjunction on the 21st – bummer. But there’s another coming up where they’ll be just as close on March 18th… of the year 2080. Fingers crossed that’ll be clear!
Orthallelous 
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