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Showing posts from January, 2018

Starting off 2018: Jupiter-Mars Conjunction

The entire last year has been a disaster on this blog. For the entire year I managed only one post and that too thanks to an accidental spotting. While I am determined to make at least one post per month this year, I am not entirely sure how the weather would work out. Thankfully, the year started with multiple events of astronomical significance. The 1st January was a full moon day that causes some interesting religious/cultural effects in Sri Lanka. It was also a supermoon. But this post is not about that. The month of January this year saw another interesting astronomical event; planetary conjunction of Mars and Jupiter. A planetary conjunction is an event where two planets appear at a very small angle in the sky. In laymen's terms, the two planets look very close to each other. In the conjunction that happened in January, the closest apparent angle between the two planets was about 0.25 degrees. What does that really mean? That means something close to half the width of