Caoimhín's Content

Today we are looking ahead to the month of June. We’re not looking very far into the future, just to the 7th, still just at the beginning of the month. Most of the interesting events in June are happening later in the month, for example the summer solstice and Mercury’s greatest elongation. There are some interesting things coming up next month, but we’re taking a look early in the month thanks to a suggestion. If you know of any events that are coming up that you would like to see discussed or described here, just drop a comment below or on the attached video, I’m always happy to take a look at interesting things in the sky.

It was suggested that I look at Venus for the evening of the 7th and at sunset Venus and Jupiter are quite close together on that date. We can also just about see Mercury, it’s just about visible from Ireland. Mercury is coming up to its greatest eastern elongation later in June, so it’s starting to be visible, but we will take a further look at Mercury in a future piece. Venus and Jupiter here quite close together, but also quite close to disappearing behind trees or buildings. No matter where we are, we’re going to be looking at Jupiter and Venus at sunset, low in the west. In order to give ourselves the best chance of seeing the conjunction we’d need a completely flat horizon, for example looking out over the ocean, that will give you a better view of Jupiter and Venus coming together in this quite close conjunction.

This is a pretty close conjunction between Venus and Jupiter, the two brightest things that we only see at nighttime. Of course the Sun and the Moon are brighter, but we see them during the ay as well. It would take a very large field of view to see Jupiter and Venus together. With a one degree of arc field of view, you would need a pretty good telescope to see a couple of Jupiter’s moons along with Venus. I was told to simulate the whole evening, but of course Venus and Jupiter are only above the horizon for a pretty short period of time here in Ireland. To look at them for a little bit longer, we’re going to get rid of the ground and we’re going to get rid of the atmosphere. This means we can follow Venus and Jupiter after they set. We’re going to focus on Venus to keep us looking in the right direction. As we move forward through the dates, the planets do seem to get closer together, but they’re not on exactly the same part of the ecliptic. As Venus orbits the Sun it reaches a certain distance from it n our sky and then starts moving back in the opposite direction, so that is going to complicate how we see Venus and Jupiter in our sky. We’ll get back to the 7th and we will move to a different location. Not only was I informed to look at Venus and Jupiter for this particular date, I was also told to look at them from a particular location. Before we go to a different location to take a look at them, from Ireland we’ve got Mercury, Venus, and Jupiter along with the two bright stars in Gemini, Pollux and Castor.

If we move through the dates again, Venus will continue to move away from the Sun, whereas Jupiter is moving towards the Sun in our sky. I don’t hear this being called retrograde motion as often, but it is. In the evening, when Venus is moving against the direction that we would expect everything to move, usually that’s not called retrograde motion as much as the motion in the morning is called retrograde motion but technically it is. It is apparent retrograde motion, it looks like Venus is moving in the wrong direction and Mercury does this as well. We’re going to head to the recommended location for observing this conjunction between Venus and Jupiter, which I assume is the main event. We need to go to 19 degrees, 57 minutes and 20 seconds of arc North latitude, and for the longitude I was told 27 degrees, but no mention of minutes or seconds so roughly 27 degrees west should be good enough. We’re going to stay at an elevation of 10 meters. Very high elevations will give you a slightly different view, but 10 meters elevation is fine, the elevation changes won’t make too much of a difference. That puts us in West Africa, almost northwest Africa, in the west of the Sahara, and it gives us a good view of Jupiter and Venus. We are significantly closer to the equator, so already they are up much higher during the day and staying visible for quite a while as they set. It hasn’t become an occultation or anything like that, it is still a conjunction, but this location does allow us to observe them for longer.

As I said, I was told to go through the whole evening, so I will push through at least until the 8th, and they do continue to get closer. Following the planets without the ground or the atmosphere can be disorienting, because we’re following the two planets across our sky, down underneath ourselves, and then back up into the sky. Venus continues to overtake Jupiter as we move through to the 11th. We’ll zoom back out and bring back the atmosphere and the ground to take a look at how those two planets pass by each other over the course of a few days. We’ll also come back a little bit closer to the beginning of the June as well. Moving back towards the beginning of June and back closer to today, Venus and Jupiter and Mercury are all moving away from each other, Mercury is very difficult to see while we’re still in May. As we come forward into June, they come closer together, possibly closer together on the 8th and 9th, and then they continue to pass by each other. If we keep moving into the future, Jupiter would just about be catching up with Mercury, but we can see that Mercury reaches its greatest elongation and then turns around, moving away from Jupiter again.

In this early evening view of the sunset, there are three planets and they’re going to be in a great position certainly on the 7th. We’ll take a slightly closer look at Venus just in case its relationship to Jupiter in the sky isn’t what we’re supposed to be looking at, but it does seem like Venus is just Venus. It is not quite on our side of the Sun, and we can tell because it’s not fully illuminated, but it’s not quite a half either. As we move through time Venus doesn’t change particularly much. It does change orientation, of course, because we’re following it across the sky. It doesn’t look like Venus is moving past any particularly bright or famous star either. We’ll hop back to our default viewing location back here in Ireland, but of course if we can see this conjunction happening from Ireland at 52 degrees north and from Africa at just 19 degrees north, that means most people around the world are going to have a good chance of viewing this conjunction.

Back in Ireland we’ll come back a few days. Mercury is much lower to the horizon, everything’s lower to the horizon because of the angle of the ecliptic, but we can still see Venus and Jupiter coming close together, although maybe they don’t look quite as close from here as they do from closer to the equator. As we keep moving forward, we can see Jupiter going in the direction of Mercury but they don’t seem to be visible as close together from here in Ireland as they would be from the equator and again, that makes sense. After the close conjunction the Moon joins the planets, and we will take a further look at that in the next piece when we’re going to look generally at what’s coming up in June. We’ll look more at the greatest elongation of Mercury and the solstice as well.

I hope you get a chance to see the close conjunction of Venus and Jupiter, it looks like it will be visible from most locations around the world and they will be pretty close together over a couple of days, it looks like the 7th, 8th, 9th will be the best days to observe them. I hope that you get to see it in real life, but if you don’t I hope you enjoyed this description. If you enjoyed this piece then please do like it and if you like this kind of content, then please subscribe to this website and my YouTube channel. Thank you very much for reading and hopefully I’ll see you back here next time.