We have known for thousands of years that the sky is full of harmonies and rhythms. Pythagoras called it the “music of the spheres.”
As part of the build-up to next week’s great conjunction, Steffen Thorsen (CEO of timeanddate.com) and I have written a piece for Sky & Telescope on the pattern of closer-than-usual approaches between Jupiter and Saturn.
Our team of programmers, astronomers, and enthusiasts at timeanddate.com wanted to visualize the roughly 400-year rhythm of super-close conjunctions between Jupiter and Saturn. For fun, we created an algorithm to run through a mathematical model of Jupiter’s and Saturn’s movements over a 16,000-year period.
Image credits: Steffen Thorsen & Graham Jones, Sky & Telescope
