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Today we are going to take a look at a few conjunctions of Jupiter and Saturn. You may remember from a reasonably recent piece, we took a look at a conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in 2080, so we’re going to very quickly review that conjunction first.

Travelling from June 2026 to 2080 does let us see Jupiter and Saturn close together, but we’re not on the right date yet. We will remove the atmosphere and the ground so that they don’t get in the way while we move through time to bring Saturn and Jupiter a bit closer. is doesn’t take long to find a very close conjunction between Saturn and Jupiter, their moons visible together through a telescope. We need to zoom in a bit closer to see Jupiter and Saturn, the rings, the moons, all together. There’s a whole separate [iece about this conjunction, Saturn and Jupiter in 2080, if you want to take a look at that it’s further back in the archive of posts. However, a helpful commenter pointed out that similar conjunctions occurred every 20 years leading up to this one. We’re going to jump back from 2080 to 2060 and see how close the conjunction is there. If there are any interesting events that you would like discussed here, all you need to do is comment them and I am happy to take a look. The conjunction in 2060 is another great conjunction between Jupiter and Saturn, but they’re not quite as close. Keeping them both in the same field of view, Jupiter’s moons are just about visible, Saturn’s moons not as much, but they are fairly close together in the sky.

This doesn’t happen every 20 years exactly, but there was another conjunction 20 years before 2060, still looking into our future. Dropping back to 2040, we’ll move through time to bring the planers back to conjunction. They’ve both just been very close to their opposition, and we can tell by the reversal of movement that they demonstrate against the background stars. They get closer together and then start to move seemingly in the opposite direction, and then they come back together. This change in direction, the retrograde motion, of Jupiter and Saturn occurs when they are close to opposition. All of the planets further from the Sun than the Earth have a period of time in our sky where they look like they’re moving in the wrong direction as we draw level with them. As they come to conjunction Saturn and Jupiter get fairly close in our sky. Not as close as they were, or will be, in 2080, nor as close as 2060. We went into the future, we’re traveling back in time but are still ahead of our present, so when referring to things the temporal grammar gets a little bit complicated. Finally coming back to 2020, we don’t even need to change the date by that much to get a much closer conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn, more similar to the one that we will be seeing in 2080.

This conjunction has already happened back in 2020. This is what seems to be fairly regular every 20 years over this period from 2020 to 2080. However, it’s not exactly 20 years. This conjunction is in the 12th month of 2020, in December, whereas when we see this conjunction in 2040, it’s the 10th month, October. The actual length is a little under 20 years. Here, I will thank again the helpful commenter who gave me these years so that we could look at these conjunctions. We’re going way back to 1226. Saturn isn’t that close to Jupiter just, so we’ll move through time and see how close together we can get them in 1226. They’re do a very similar thing as what we saw in 2040, where they’re getting close together, they’re entering retrograde motion. That retrograde motion has to change again before we get the actual conjunction. It looks like a great one in 1226. Even better, I must say, than the one in 2080, so it’s a pity, of course that this one is in the past.

We haven’t seen, through all of these dates, an occultation of Saturn by Jupiter, which would look very impressive. This close conjunction however allows a mix of moons to be seen under enough magnification. The the rings and the stripes are visible together. Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, it’s stripes and the Rings of Saturn, all visible together. Titan, the largest moon of Saturn is visible along with various smaller moons. Also visible are Jupiter’s Galilean moons, though we’ll have to zoom out a little bit to catch Callisto. All of that makes for a fantastic view in 1226. That’s way in the past, that may have been the best conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn out of all the ones mentioned here. What we’re going to do now is come back to 2020, quite a bit closer to the modern day. We’ll zoom back out, we’ll find Jupiter and Saturn again and we’ll watch them from the 2020 conjunction till 2040. We’ll have to move forward practically to the end of the year for the conjunction, and as we do they get closer together and then change direction as they go through that retrograde motion. Then they change back and the two largest planets get very close together in a conjunction.

We’re not going to see conjunctions like this every year simply because Jupiter and Saturn are both on their own journeys around the Sun. As we move through time, they move apart from one another, The stars that are behind them are also changing because we’re orbiting the Sun. The planets go through conjunction with the Sun and as we’re moving through the years, Saturn and Jupiter are only getting further apart. We’re getting closer and closer to this year, with Jupiter is really lagging behind Saturn. Saturn seems to be making much quicker progress across the sky, it looks to be ahead of Jupiter. Saturn does orbit the Sun slower than Jupiter, what’s really happening here involve three different planets, our orbit around the Sun and the different speeds of these orbits. Coming back to the modern day, if we zoom out Jupiter is pretty far from Saturn, not quite on opposite sides of the sky yet, but very far apart. We’ll be seeing their oppositions at practically opposite times of the year. We’ll keep pushing forward, but of course we’ve got a long journey ahead of us here.

As we move through from superior conjunction (with the Sun) back to opposition those changes in direction happen again. That little bit of retrograde motion which occurs with planets that are further from the Sun than we are, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Saturn is quite far from the Sun, so its retrograde motion is quite slow, it happens over the course of several days. That makes it a little bit harder to notice than the retrograde motion we see with planets like Mercury and Venus that are so much closer to the Sun. Coming up to 2030, we’re halfway between the two conjunctions, one in 2020 and one in 2040, and that puts Jupiter and Saturn practically on opposite sides of the sky, they’re very nearly opposed to each other. We’ve got 10 more years, which hopefully we will get through fairly quickly, going day by day so that things don’t jump too drastically.

We’ll stop at around 2035 as well, when we should start seeing Jupiter and Saturn getting closer together. As we’re moving through time here, we’re skipping past loads of other interesting conjunctions. For example, the Moon getting very close to Saturn. Saturn’s moving past the other planets as it comes in towards the Sun or appears to come in towards the Sun from our perspective. We’ve got a Saturn, Mars and Mercury triple conjunction coming up in 2032. Then Saturn and Venus get very close together, way too close to the Sun for us to see from here on Earth. We have Saturn coming very close to Uranus as well, we’d have to zoom in a little bit to see where Neptune is because it’s so faint. There will be a reasonable conjunction of Saturn and Mercury as we come through to 2033. So we’re zooming ahead into the future here, and I’m sure we’re missing some very interesting events. There’s always interesting things happening in the sky, but we’re going forward again to 2040 to see that conjunction. Coming up to 2035 now, Jupiter is clearly starting to get closer to Saturn as the cycle begins to repeat. We’ll stabilize our view on Saturn so that we can watch Saturn slowly catching up to Jupiter and because of the alternating retrograde motions, it will look like Saturn and Jupiter get a little close together before they separate and then actually start coming together.

Before the conjunction we’re looking for, there’s a great conjunction of Saturn and Mars, then another with Saturn and Mercury, along with the Moon going past. There’s always interesting things in the sky, and it’s hard not to stop and take a look. There’s a great conjunction of Saturn and Venus, then Saturn and Regulus passing very close together right around its retrograde motion. This is a real planetary parade with the planets marching across the sky. Along with Saturn there being close to Regulus in the sky, Jupiter moves past Regulus in the sky. A little earlier they passed Spica and Antares. They move through of the constellations that are on the ecliptic, what we would call the zodiacal constellations. Due to this, the planets having conjunctions or occultations with those bright stars near the ecliptic is common. Finally back to 2040, I hadn’t noticed how close to the Sun this conjunction will be at first glance, so this might be a difficult conjunction to see.

That is the whole cycle from 2020 to 2040, as well as 2060, 2080 and 1226, several close conjunctions of Jupiter and Saturn. We’re not going to get to see these for decades, of course, we’ve got a decade and a half before we get through to Saturn and Jupiter’s next conjunction. I hope you are looking forward to it and I hope you enjoyed this description. If you did like this piece, then please do like it and if you enjoy this content, 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.