L.A. City Hall with an impressive trio: the moon, Venus and Jupiter

A crescent moon, Venus (the lowest point of light) and Jupiter (to the right of Venus) appear in the sky Monday (Dec. 1), with L.A.’s City Hall in the foreground.

The conjunction, when the bodies appeared closest to each other, occurred on Nov. 30.

Here’s how Anthony Cook describes this event on the Griffith Observatory’s Sky Report:

“This conjunction is simply a chance alignment of objects separated by tens and hundreds of millions of miles–they are not actually close to each other in space,” the online report says.

“At the time of the conjunction, the moon is about 240,000 miles from us, Venus is the same distance from us as the sun, 93 million miles, and Jupiter is about as far away as it can be from us, 539 million miles.”

Related post: “Alignment of Jupiter, Venus and a crescent moon still visible tonight.”

–Mary Forgione

[Photo: Don Bartletti / Los Angeles Times]

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This entry was posted on Monday, December 1, 2008 at 9:04 pm by Mary Forgione and is filed under California, Los Angeles, Sky watching. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.