The article below was published in the daily newspaper Sud Ouest, France, on April 22, 1980.
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It is remembered that several readers in the area had reported to us the presence in the sky of a UFO. This unidentified flying object has been identified by the observatory of Floirac: it was... Venus.
Other phenomena of this type, Mr. Dumont told us, from the Gironde observatory, will occur.
"Besides the important brilliance of Venus, three other planets will not fail to intrigue even insensitive observers, by their mutual movements and reconciliations, and this throughout the spring. While Venus will gradually fade towards the western horizon, to reappear in July, in the morning in the east, with the same brightness (a hundred times that of a "first-magnitude" star) Mars, Jupiter and Saturn planets begin to offer us, in collaboration with the star Regulus (first magnitude), an astonishing spectacle of crossovers that will last until summer Jupiter, fifteen times brighter than Regulus, will remain very close to this star, it is easy to spot this couple as soon as at night, high in the sky and in full south, but the whole will lower slowly towards the southwest during these three months Saturn, of the same brightness as Regulus, will remain further to the left of the couple.
As for Mars, twice as bright as Regulus (and reddish in comparison with all the other stars), it is now a little above and to the right of the Jupiter-Regulus pair, but it drifts to the left, and gets closer to it. The trio will be very spectacular from late April to mid-May, especially from May 7 to May 10 when the three stars will be side by side as on a podium, the brightest in the middle, as it should be. After that, Mars, continuing its shift towards the east, will move away from Jupiter and Regulus and approach Saturn; it will pass just below the latter on June 23rd.
These evolutions are due to the relative movements, in their almost circular orbits, of the Earth and the three other planets in question; only two brilliant stars can intervene, being quite close to the mean plane of the planets; they are Regulus and the Epi of the Virgin. Although not of major scientific interest, multiple connections as beautiful as those of 1980 are rare, and deserve to be followed."
