On Monday (December 21), Jupiter and Saturn appeared closer in the night sky than they were in 800 years. With the naked eye, this “Great Conjunction” looked like a single massive celestial object shining above the Earth. But with telescopes – and consumer cameras equipped with telescopic lenses – the planets showed their individual faces in stunning detail as they passed through the sky.
Florian Kriechbaumer, a photographer from the United Arab Emirates, captured the celestial spectacle from one of the most shocking locations on Earth: near the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world. In a large parking area opposite the skyscraper (which is 2,720 feet high or 830 meters high), Kriechbaumer filmed the conjunction for 45 minutes, capturing the moment when the two planets came closest. from each other (from his point of view).
You can see his results in the video below, which condensed the entire footage in about 20 seconds.
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“When I shot them, there were a few clouds, so I was eager to even catch him,” Kriechbaumer told Live Science in an email. “Fortunately, they opened at the right time. The sight of the rings of Saturn and Jupiter with some of its moons appear side by side in your viewfinder is just such an incredible moment.”
“Everyone should go out and experience the life of the planets and the night sky once in a lifetime,” he added.
Amazingly how it appears from Earth, Saturn and Jupiter were not very close during the conjunction, Live Science previously reported. Jupiter is currently about 550 million miles (890 million kilometers) from Earth, or about 5.9 times the distance from Earth to the sun, while Saturn is about 1 billion miles (1.6 billion). km) from the Earth, or about 10.8 times the distance from the Earth to the sun. In relation to each other, the planets were still 724 million km away from 450 million miles. They show close to us simply because Jupiter’s orbit brought it to the line between Earth and Saturn.
Originally published on Live Science.