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Mars, Jupiter, Venus to dance in sky

ABC

ABC

Mars, Jupiter and Venus will this week come close together in the skies over Earth, in a “planetary dance” that promises to delight astronomers.

Amateur astronomer Ian Musgrave from the University of Adelaide said the three planets would come close together to form what is called a planetary conjunction.

“Venus, Jupiter and Mars are doing what we might like to call a planetary dance, in that the planets are coming relatively close to each other, as we see them in the sky,” he said.

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“Of course, they’re actually separated by millions of miles [but] when the planets are close to each other in the sky we call this a planetary conjunction.”

This means the orbits of Mars, Jupiter and Venus have each come to a point where, from Earth, they align closely in the sky.

“As Jupiter is rising higher in the sky, having just come out from behind the Sun at the end of last month — and the same with Mars — as they move further along in their orbits they catch up with Venus, which has pretty much reached the furthest point of its orbit before it starts coming back in towards the Sun again,” Dr Musgrave said.

“So they’ll come very close to each other because of orbits of the planets are mostly in the same plane.

“They can get very, very close or moderately close and in this particular case if you’ve been up at about five o’clock in the morning, you’ll have been able to see Venus and Jupiter strung out in a line just above the horizon.”

Dr Musgrave said the bright stars Regulus and Procyon also formed a line in the sky with the planets.

“It’s been really quite pretty,” he said.

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