Moon, Jupiter, Venus Conjunction

The moon, Jupiter nad Venus will all fit within a 4-degree circle tonight. With the sun setting early this time of year, it should be dark enough by between 5:00 and 5:30 pm to get out and see these.   By 6:30 pm, they will start to dip into the haze near the horizon.  If you have a pair of binoculars, all three should easity fit in the same field of view. Since the moon is only 4 days old, it won’t be so overwhelmingly bright that you can’t see the other two planets.

Think about what you’re seeing as you look through your binoculars. In the same field of view, you are capturing our nearest celstial neighbor, a planet which is only 2/3 the distance from the sun as we are, and the larget planet in the solar system, that takes 12 years to make a single orbit.