Two nights ago I stood in my driveway at 5:45pm freezing, squinting at the southwestern sky, trying to find the thing everyone on Twitter was calling the "Christmas Star." That's not actually a star, it's Jupiter and Saturn sliding so close together in the sky that from here they basically merge into one bright point. Astronomers call it the Great Conjunction, and this one was a big deal because the two planets haven't appeared this close together in the sky since 1226. Not 1926. Twelve twenty-six. Genghis Khan was still alive the last time that happened.
I know this because I spent about four days beforehand telling anyone who'd listen. My neighbor got the full rundown while we were both taking out the trash, poor guy.
So obviously I had to see it, and obviously I decided the right way to document that was with my iPhone, no tripod, standing there holding my breath like that would somehow help. It did not help. What I got was a slightly fuzzy orange smear against a navy background that could, generously, be described as "two things" if you already knew what you were looking for. Zoomed in it looks like a photo taken through a dirty windshield. I've deleted worse photos than this one and felt fine about it, but this one's staying, because it's proof I was there, not because it's good.
Here's the thing about phone cameras that I keep forgetting and relearning every single time: they're incredible at almost everything except the two things I actually want them for, which are the moon and distant planets. Give me a burrito on a plate under bad restaurant lighting and sure, gorgeous, HDR does its job, looks better than the burrito actually looked in person. Point the same phone at Jupiter and it just gives up. The sensor's too small, the zoom past a certain point is digital not optical, and no amount of Apple marketing about "computational photography" changes the fact that you're still bound by the physics of a lens the size of a lentil. I looked it up afterward and apparently the people who got real shots used actual telescopes, or at minimum a DSLR on a tripod with a long exposure. I don't own either of those things, so I got what I got, which was a smear.
I did use an app called Sky Guide to find where to point in the first place, and that part actually worked exactly as advertised: hold your phone up and it shows you the sky overlaid with labels, Jupiter here, Saturn there, less than a moon's-width apart and closing. So the app delivered. It's just the camera that let me down.
Meanwhile, completely unrelated except that it's also tech news from this exact same week: Sony pulled Cyberpunk 2077 off the PlayStation Store entirely on the 18th and started giving full refunds to anyone who bought it. Not a patch, not a "we're sorry, here's a discount code," an actual delisting of a sixty dollar game five days after launch. I've never seen a major publisher do that before, and I don't think I've seen a first-party storefront do it either. I haven't played it myself (it's sitting in my backlog behind about six other things) but I've watched the PS4 footage going around, character models glitching through walls, framerate falling off a cliff in the middle of the city. Rough. I feel for anyone who preordered off those early trailers, because those looked incredible and apparently bore very little resemblance to what actually shipped on base consoles.
Anyway, back to the sky. If you missed the conjunction on the 21st, the two planets are still close enough over the next few nights that it's worth stepping outside right around dusk and looking low in the southwest. You'll know it when you see it, because it genuinely looks like one unusually bright point of light where you don't expect one. Don't bother trying to photograph it with your phone unless you enjoy disappointment. Or do, actually, take the bad photo anyway. I'm weirdly glad I have mine even though it's ugly.
I ordered a cheap eleven dollar tripod off Amazon last night, so next time there's something worth pointing a camera at for longer than half a second, I'll actually be set up for it. We'll see if it shows up before New Year's.