How to see the ‘Christmas Star’ in Southeast Asia

One way to end 2020 strong, stargazers, is with a must-see celestial show. Each evening now through Monday, see the two largest planets in our solar system slide closer to each other until their climactic union on Monday.

That’s when the “great conjunction” of Jupiter and Saturn will see the two merge and appear as one brighter-than-usual union called the “Christmas Star.” Though lesser conjunctions occur roughly every two decades, Monday will be the closest, and therefore the brightest, they will come to each other in eight centuries. 

“You’d have to go all the way back to just before dawn on March 4, 1226, to see a closer alignment between these objects visible in the night sky,” said Patrick Hartigan, an astronomer at Rice University in Texas.

It’s also earned another, more romantic name: the “Christmas Kiss.” 

The closer to the equator…