Watch the skies.
Planets and stars align quite often, but this April saw a once in a thousand years event when Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn all lined up with each other almost perfectly.
Now, there’s still one more spectacle in store before the end of the month and that’s Venus and Jupiter coming together in a close conjunction.
No, Venus and Jupiter aren’t actually going to collide, but it will look like that.
In reality, they’ll still be far apart but, depending on where you are on Earth, it should look like Venus is colliding into or covering Jupiter.
A conjunction happens when two planets, a planet and a star, or a planet and the Moon, appear close together from the ground. This occurs because planets have similar – although not the same – ecliptic orbits around the Sun.
NASA say this particular event will be “really impressive and make for thrilling sights in the morning sky”.
Catch the conjunction of Venus and Jupiter tomorrow morning before sunrise. All you need is a clear view to the east. Both are very bright! 🌌
Read more about Venus and Jupiter and see charts: https://t.co/LAnW0ahOjK
📸 John Jardine Goss. pic.twitter.com/oOp3GRNyH1
— EarthSky (@earthskyscience) April 29, 2022
Venus and Jupiter’s conjunction will appear in Irish and UK skies just before sunrise on Sunday 1 May, according to Astronomy Now magazine.
Sky-gazers will have the best view at this time of the morning, before the glare of the sun.
The magazine said: “Given some clear mornings over the next week or so… you can soak up the scene with the naked eye and a pair of binoculars as the two brilliant planets rapidly approach each other and then separate, with the pair remaining within the field of view of a pair of 10 x 50 binoculars until the first six days of May.”
For those of us without binoculars or telescopes, the apparent joining of Jupiter and Venus should look like a very bright blob in the sky.
This is the closest Venus and Jupiter have appeared since August 2016.
What’s more, the two planets will remain in the night sky in the for the next few months – with Venus staying visible just before dawn all the way up until September.
