By Len Wallick
This weekend Jupiter will conjoin Uranus in Pisces for the first time since 1334.
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That’s a very long time, 676 years.
When distant planets form a conjunction, it will usually repeat three times in a cluster. A Jupiter-Uranus conjunction will happen in one sign or another every 14 or so years. Now it happens to be straddling Aries and Pisces, since it’s close to when both Jupiter and Uranus are changing signs. The first conjunction was in Aries earlier this year, and the last two (including the one happening now) are in Pisces. They all happen within about three degrees of the zodiac — close to one another. The triple repeat and the apparent slide of the event (from Aries to Pisces) is because we’re watching all this from the position of the Earth. There are retrograde phases because the Earth goes around the Sun. The dance of the planets back and forth over one another is due to an illusion called parallax movement. It’s a little like Mercury retrograde. Mercury really isn’t going backwards. It just looks like it from our point of view.
The next conjunction of these two planets in Pisces — the last of three events, for this 14 year cycle, Aries, Pisces and Pisces — will be on Jan. 4, 2011 — which happens to be the same day Pluto emerges from the shadow of its recently ended retrograde. That’s not a very long time.
Back on June 8 of this year Jupiter conjoined Uranus in Aries. Uranus was in Aries in the 1920s and there hadn’t been a conjunction of Jupiter and Uranus in Aries since 1927. So that happened much more recently than the Pisces side of this story.
The next time these two planets meet in Aries, the calendar year will be in the third millennium. Those are some of the timing facts. Let’s draw some inferences, check the history and interpret further by bringing our web story of the week to what will hopefully be a useful conclusion.
Jupiter takes almost 12 Earth years to go around the Sun and hence the zodiac. That means it spends about a year in each sign. Uranus takes about 84 years to go around the Sun which amounts to about seven years in each sign. Jupiter catches up with and laps Uranus about once every 14 years. Obviously, the spots where the conjunctions happen are not evenly distributed among the signs. There are places where the conjunctions are more frequent. There are others where they hardly ever happen at all. This implies something about the orbital periodicity of the two planets relative to each other as seen from Earth.