Screw the impending asteroid hit flyby, Venus and Jupiter are colliding on Friday. Well, getting near each other.

Not that I’m skeptical of the NASA article on the topic, but they take an interesting tack on explaining why it is so neat that Jupiter and Venus will converge: because our eyes evolved to take notice.

From the article:

It’s worth the effort because Venus and Jupiter will be less than 1o apart, like twin headlights piercing the rosy glow of sunrise. It’s a beautiful scene. In fact, you may not be able to take your eyes off of it. Venus and Jupiter are literally spellbinding.

There is a physiological basis for this phenomenon. When two planets appear so close together, they grab an extra share of your brain’s attention. Consider the following:

“Your eye is like a digital camera,” explains Dr. Stuart Hiroyasu, O.D., of Bishop, California. “There’s a lens in front to focus the light, and a photo-array behind the lens to capture the image. The photo-array in your eye is called the retina. It’s made of rods and cones, the fleshy organic equivalent of electronic pixels.”

Near the center of the retina lies the fovea, a patch of tissue 1.5 millimeters wide where cones are extra-densely packed. “Whatever you see with the fovea, you see in high-definition,” he says. The fovea is critical to reading, driving, watching television. The fovea has the brain’s attention.

The field of view of the fovea is only about five degrees wide. On Friday morning, Venus and Jupiter will fit together inside that narrow angle, signaling to the brain, “this is worth watching!”

Interesting. Does it really make something more visually compelling, or is the NASA flack who wrote this article just reaching a bit? I dunno, just asking.

According to Wikipedia, the fovea…

…is less than 1% of the retina but takes up over 50% of the visual cortex in the brain. The fovea sees only the central two degrees of the visual field, which is roughly equivalent to twice the width of your thumbnail at arm’s length.

Curiously, since the fovea lacks rods, it can’t really make out dim objects, which is why you can only make out some stars by looking out of the side of your eye. Weird.