December 20th, 2020, 5:00 p.m. local time
Assuming no more cosmological events of note for 2020, I found the “great conjunction” of Jupiter and Saturn to be not all that great.
I have been anticipating this time for over a year, thinking about it last September when I first took this image of Jupiter and Saturn coming together. In hindsight, I am not sure exactly what I expected from a planetary alignment that is both predictable and happening purely by chance right now.
Weather may have played a role in my disappointment, as there was a slight overcast and haze. I had difficulty focusing my digital camera on tripod, even when targeting the nearby crescent Moon, due to the hazy dusk conditions. And I knew from past experiences that the view from my telescopes would have been too blurry to be worth the effort in near-freezing conditions (since the planets were so low in the sky).
But I did capture the two planets unremarkably, as you can see in the corresponding image. You probably will have to expand the image to see faint Saturn.
Perhaps in the year when I saw a comet, took my best Mars image, and captured a meteor, this conjunction was destined to be anti-climatic.
Yet if I can take one figurative observation from last night, it is this: after seeing the two planets together, it’s not hard to imagine how such an alignment, embellished by background stars or other phenomena, could have been interpreted as a divine sign by the ancients.
