Park Packed for Planets

December 21, 2020

Jupiter and three of its moons on the left; Saturn on the right.

The park was packed at sunset like I’ve never seen it before. Every parking space on Marina Boulevard and Spinnaker Way was full. People even parked on the middle green of the parking circle at the west end of Spinnaker Way; a first. All this desperation was not for the sunset. The sunset was cool, very nice, but not a gold medal. The crowd was here for the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn. Did people believe the BS in some of the press that this was the “Christmas star”? I didn’t ask. (If anything, it was the Solstice star.) To add drama, a bank of clouds covered the southwestern sky, where the twin planets were expected. Was it all a waste of time? Then, as the sunset dimmed out, just to the north of those clouds, still kind of southwesterly, although more westerly than southerly, a bright star appeared. Since there was nothing else in the air besides airplanes, helicopters, and the moon to photograph, I focused on this. Whoa! What looked like one star to the naked (tired, old) eye turned out to be two in the long zoom lens. Two plus a string of blips around the brighter, bigger light on the left. The one on the right was smaller, looked a bit oval (rings?) and maybe a bit more reddish. I clicked away, not sure what I was seeing. When I got it home I sent a copy to Alan Gould, the astronomer who had led a Zoom talk on the Solstice at sunset. He replied in minutes: ” That’s definitely Jupiter with its moons on the left and Saturn on the right, oval shape.” Hurray!

This close an approach of these two giants hasn’t been seen since the year 1623, when Galileo Galilei was still alive. In that year, according to Wikipedia, just in the first six months:

January – Forces from the Kingdom of Kongo defeat the Portuguese in the Battle of Mbanda Kasi.
February – France, Savoy, and Venice sign the Treaty of Paris, agreeing to cooperate in removing Spanish forces from the strategic Alpine pass of Valtelline.
February 25 – Thirty Years’ War: Duke Maximilian I of Bavaria becomes Elector of the Electorate of the Palatinate.
March 5 – The first American temperance law is enacted, in Virginia.
March 9 – Amboyna massacre: Ten men in the service of the British East India Company, nine Japanese and one Portuguese, are executed by the Dutch East India Company.
March 20 – Richard Frethorne begins writing a letter to his parents from Jamestown, Virginia.
April 11 – King Gwanghaegun of Joseon is deposed in the Injo coup. He is succeeded by King Injo.
April 29 – A fleet of 11 Dutch ships depart for the coast of Peru, seeking to seize Spanish treasure.
June 14 – The first breach-of-promise lawsuit: Rev. Gerville Pooley, in Virginia, files against Cicely Jordan, but loses.^[1]
June 29 – Première of Pedro Calderón de la Barca‘s first play, Amor, honor y poder, at the Court of Habsburg Spain.

And in July:

July 16 – The Great Conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn, when they were only 5 arc minutes apart, the closest since 4 March 1226. This conjunction likely went unobserved, as the telescope had been invented only recently..

So in 1623 everybody missed it. So don’t worry if you missed it tonight. It will happen again in 2080, when it will be a seniors’ field trip for today’s millennials.

To add sonic vibrations to the event tonight, a gentleman had set up a unique gong on the kite lawn facing the sunset, and produced a variety of hums, hisses, whistles, and thunders on it. He was recording it and did not want to be disturbed, understandably, so I left my card and hope that he contacts me to talk about himself and his instrument. The next day he did contact me, and I learned that his name is Max Rosenblum, he got the gong from the Gong Shop in San Francisco, and built the wooden frame himself; he’s a woodworker and his day job is building furniture and finish carpentry. While waiting for the main event, I took some photos of the moon and the bridge and the City, all attached below.