Jupiter and Venus to appear nearly touching in night sky this week

This week, the two brightest planets in our solar system — Jupiter and Venus — will draw so close together in the evening sky that they appear nearly as one, a celestial conjunction visible to any person willing to step outside and look westward after sunset. Such alignments are relatively rare, and rarer still is the quality they share with only a handful of natural phenomena: they ask nothing of the observer except attention. In an age of mediated experience, the night sky offers its spectacle freely, indifferent to whether we are watching.