Venus and Jupiter head for conjunction

The king of the gods is marching closer every day to the goddess of love, as anyone can plainly see in the western sky during twilight.

Whether this great celestial drama means anything depends on whether you believe in the ancient pagan gods and goddesses or, more precisely, in their symbolic influences on us from the sky. Many people still do, though they might not admit it quite so baldly.

Just glance south-southwest as twilight deepens, and big, bright Jupiter will hit you in the eye. Look well down to Jupiter's lower right before twilight turns to dark, and there shines Venus, even brighter.

Tonight the waxing crescent moon poses to the left of Venus, as shown in the twilight scene here. As the moon waxes, or thickens, in the next few days, it will move toward the upper left to shine with Jupiter on Monday.

Jupiter has been sidling across the sky toward Venus for months now. Tonight the two are still separated by about three times the width of your fist held at arm's length. But keep an eye on them each clear evening, and you can watch Jupiter drawing nearer Venus all November. It creeps rightward by a bit less than a finger's width each day, while Venus climbs a little higher, as if rising to meet it.

The climax will come when the two reach conjunction, shining dramatically together just one finger apart, on the evenings of Nov. 30 and Dec. 1. By then, the crescent moon will be back on the scene, as well, making for quite a spectacle. Mark your calendar.

Cosmic conceit
What are we to make of this event? Back when people thought the world was flat and humans were the center of everything, such heavenly doings certainly had to mean something. We were the crown of creation, and the universe literally revolved around us. So, was a prominent king going to take a wife on Nov. 30? Would power somehow combine with love? Back then, astrologers could game the equivalent of the stock market with such forecasts - anyone could see the evidence right there in the sky! - or spread fear into enemy armies or, especially, manipulate a gullible court.

After all, the more self-important a person feels, the more he is liable to take seriously the premise of astrology, that the planets are all about him.

They're not. They're inanimate, uncaring rocks and gasballs, less relevant to the events in your life than boulders lying in the woods miles away.

Feeling smaller and smaller
The long story of scientific discovery for the last half millennium has one consistent theme running through it. We keep finding vast new expanses of reality that we didn't know about before. And these discoveries keep making us and our wants and needs look smaller, more insignificant, and more irrelevant to the overall scheme of things.

It's not just that the universe has turned out to be inconceivably large and varied. It's not just that quadrillions of planets are now known to exist. It's also that the 5,000-year history of human civilization turns out to be just a tiny sliver of cosmic time. The age of the universe, astronomers have recently determined, is 13.7 billion years since the Big Bang. If you represent even just the age of the Earth (4.6 billion years) as the height of the Prudential Building, the length of all recorded human history is the thickness of the layer of paint on the ceiling of the top floor.

And now, physicists are saying they have good reason to think that the Big Bang was one of countless other big bangs that are continuously happening in a much larger multiverse, in which our universe is an infinitesimal speck. There is no end in sight.

It does, or should, make you feel a bit humble about what the cosmos thinks of us and our doings.

Alan M. MacRobert is a senior editor of Sky & Telescope magazine in Cambridge (SkyandTelescope.com). His Star Watch column appears the first Saturday of every month.