On November 12, 2026, the Moon, Venus, and Spica aligned in the night sky in a conjunction captured from Poland above the Tatra Mountains. Planets appear to shift relative to fixed stars as they move through space, and when they appear close to other objects from Earth's perspective, astronomers call these alignments conjunctions. They follow the precise laws of celestial mechanics rather than occurring by chance.
The bright star appearing near Venus in this conjunction is Spica in the constellation Virgo. Spica ranks among the brightest stars visible from Earth and lies approximately 250 light-years away. Astronomers identified Spica as a binary star system in 1890, consisting of two massive blue stars orbiting each other every 4 days. Earlier in 2026, researchers reported that Spica is actually a triple star system.