A beautiful sight that takes place in the night sky these days is the Venus-Jupiter opposition.

In some mythologies Venus, the goddess of love, harmony, fertility and spring, is the daughter of Jupiter – lord of the world and skies, ruler of the pantheon. The two planets have a similar magnificent brilliance and feel to them, as they are both very bright and big, like radiating giant stars appearing in the skies. (Of course, the two are not actually stars. They are planets, and the light we see radiating is not their own, but rather the Sun’s, reflecting off of them as it does from the Moon.) Small Venus is close to planet Earth (the closest planet to Earth and about the same size) and huge Jupiter (biggest planet in our solar system) is 7 times further from the Sun than Venus, and as such in the skies the two would seem similar, although they are in fact very different in size.

These days Venus is the first planet (star) to shine when night falls. You can easily see Venus in the west after sunset, and for the next hour or two. After that Venus sets, just as the Sun did before her. Jupiter is exactly on the other side of the skies these days, and this means that as Venus sets in the west, Jupiter rises in the east. So throughout the night we have one of the two guardians watching over us from the heavens. Jupiter will do its journey in the skies during the night, following the same path the Sun does during the day, till it sets in the west at dawn.   

The astrological affect of the two planets sitting on either side of the see-saw (being in opposition, in astrological terms) is that our emotions are enhanced these days, for better or worse, and this of course is something to know and take into account.