Updated 7pm

The planets Jupiter and Venus might be 400 million miles apart but this evening they appeared to be very close together in the evening sk.

Astrophysicist Joseph Caruana said this phenomenon is known as conjunction - when a planet appears close to a moon, star, or another planet.

“The reason they currently appear close together in the sky is simply a matter of perspective. At the moment, if you drew a line between Earth and Venus, and another between Earth and Jupiter, these would be almost coincident,” Caruana explains.

Over the past few days, the western sky has been graced with the sight of the two bright planets appearing to approach each other day by day. Jupiter, the largest planet, and Venus, the brightest planet, were initially joined by a crescent moon.

A photograph of Jupiter (left) and Venus (right) taken yesterday, 1st March. In this photograph, the four principal moons of Jupiter, the Galilean moons, are also visible as four small dots of light. PHOTO: Joseph Caruana)

The planets kept drawing closer and closer until they appeared next to each other in Wednesday’s evening sky.

“They will appear similarly close this evening, but they will switch positions, with Venus appearing higher in the sky than Jupiter,” he said on Thursday morning.

If one uses a zoom lens to take a closer look at Jupiter, they can also see its four principal moons - the so-called Galilean moons, named after the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei, who was the first to observe them with a telescope and record their motion as they orbit their parent planet, Caruana added.