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Stargazers around the world didn't pass up an opportunity to see a rare event in the night sky.
Planets Jupiter (left) and Saturn are seen during the Great Conjunction from the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles.
On Monday evening, Jupiter and Saturn appeared closer to each other than they have for hundreds of years, in what has become known as the Great Conjunction. Their proximity is the view from Earth. In space, the planets are hundreds of millions of miles apart.
People stand in a queue to see the Great Conjunction at the Maidan area in Kolkata, India.
Jupiter and Saturn's positions in the sky align "about once every 20 years," according to NASA, though almost never this closely.
People watch the alignment in Edgerton, Kan.
"You'd have to go all the way back to just before dawn on March 4, 1226, to see a closer alignment between these objects visible in the night sky," Patrick Hartigan, an astronomer at Rice University, said in a recent statement.
Kuwaiti astrophotographers Mohammad al-Obaidi, right, and Abdullah al-Harbi follow the Great Conjunction in al-Salmi district, a desert area west of Kuwait City.
Photographers around the world captured images of the gas giants appearing to shift close together — and groups of people taking in the unique sight.
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