Three bright companions cradle the Moon early tomorrow: the planet Jupiter and the brightest stars of Taurus. The whole group climbs into good view by midnight, and stands high in the sky at dawn. The star Elnath is to the left of the Moon at that hour, with brilliant Jupiter to the lower left of the Moon, and Aldebaran a little farther below the Moon.

There’s a big gap in the distances to the four bodies. Yet they’re all among our closest neighbors.

On average, the Moon is the closest of all. Tonight, it’s just 230,000 miles away. Small asteroids occasionally pass closer than that. But most of the time, those bodies are much farther.

Jupiter is the next-closest member of the group. Right now, the Sun’s largest planet is 445 million miles away. At that distance, it takes years to get there. Even so, nine spacecraft have traveled to Jupiter. Another mission is en route, with one more scheduled for launch next month.

Aldebaran is about 65 light-years away – more than 850,000 times farther than Jupiter. And Elnath is double that distance. That puts them far beyond our ability to reach them. Even so, they’re quite close as stars go. Our home galaxy, the Milky Way, spans a hundred thousand light-years. And all the other major galaxies are millions or billions of light-years away. So the Moon and tomorrow’s companions are all close neighbors – just down the cosmic block.

Script by Damond Benningfield