Browsing through Facebook, I learned that Jupiter and Saturn will align on the longest night of the year. Just after sunset, they will seem to be so close that they will appear to be one large light in the sky. As this will happen in the west quite near the horizon, it won't be visible from our home. We can go up the escarpment to catch a glimpse if the sky is clear.

Intrigued by the comments about this event, I did some research into what is going on. I learned--and maybe I once knew this--that Jupiter moves a lot faster around the sun than Saturn does. Neither of them makes that orbit very often--it takes Jupiter 11.86 earth years to make that journey and Saturn 29.4. Sometimes they will be on the opposite side of the sun to each other.

I shouldn't be so surprised about how long it takes those outer planets to orbit the sun. They have a lot farther to go than our planet does. The dwarf planet Pluto takes 248 of our years to make that trip. And I had forgotten that for about twenty years of that time, it is closer to the sun than Neptune. But we can't see either of those bodies without the help of a telescope and good guidance on where to look.

What we could see back in October was how close Mars was to earth. At that time, our orbits lined up, and Mars was a bright red. This I noticed every morning as our view to the east is clear.

Watching the eastern sky is an interesting shift in perspective for me. Our clearest view on the farm was to the south. I watched Orion's movement through the year. To see the western and northern sky we had to go outside. The eastern horizon was masked by the cedar swamp, but we could see anything that climbed above the trees.

Back in the summer, I did get up early and go outside to catch sight of the comet that came somewhat near us. The morning I tried, there was too much mist along the horizon.  

We've been lucky this fall that most full moon nights have had few clouds. The silver disk has been clear in the night sky with its bright reflection laying a path across the bay.

There will be two meteor showers this month. These I am not likely to catch much of. I don't go outside at night in the cold as much these days. Back on the farm, there were reasons to go to the barn at night, usually to look after lambs. Now, it is tempting to stay inside in the evenings, especially when it is cold, and just take in what I can see from the house. I have been known, however, to go down to the shore to look north when the aurora borealis is predicted.

Thinking about my own shifting patterns of behaviour and my shifting perspective, I am aware that what I see in the night sky is completely determined by where I am.

The sky of the southern hemisphere is very different from the north. People in the south will get to see a solar eclipse this month. The patterns of the stars are different. I can find the northern star, but never got the hang of the southern cross. Maybe that is in part because when I lived in the southern hemisphere, I was mostly in a city where light masks the stars.

What people are calling the great conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn is also about perspective: they will only seem to line up from earth. From Mars or the moon, they won't. And the two planets will not in fact be very close together.

The Milky Way is an arm of our galaxy, but the rest of the pictures we draw in the sky are our invention. The stars that trace out the hunter Orion only do so from our perspective here. They do not reflect any relationship between those distant suns. From one of the stars of Orion's belt, the sky map looks completely different. Our map of the sky is just ours.

Cathy Hird lives on the traditional territory of the Saugeen Ojibway