If you look west over Kitimat’s mountains, with the skies clear about an hour after the summery sunset, you will see the planets Venus and Jupiter in the sky. Venus is closer and brighter and seen to the right, lower on the horizon. Jupiter, farther away of course, and not as bright, can be seen about fifteen minutes or so after you spot Venus.

The two brightest planets low in the evening sky generate lots of interest and are easy and convenient to see with the naked eye,” s Paul Delaney, professor emeritus at York University’s Department of Physics and Astronomy told CBC News.

“They easily show from day to day the movement of objects in the solar system.”
While they will look close together in the sky, they are still very far apart: they lie roughly 670 million kilometres from each other.

As they near each other, Venus will overtake Jupiter and appear higher in the sky. You can see them just over a degree apart on June 8. On June 9, they will be even closer. At this point the weather forecasts for Kitimat on those days calls for partly cloudy and possible rain.

The wide view was taken with the Alpha 55 and Tamron 70-300 lens. The planets with my Sony 400-800 lens at 800mm.