Stargazers capture stunning photos of Venus and Jupiter as planets appear in morning sky

Photographers were able to capture stunning shots of Jupiter and Venus as the planets loomed in close conjunction in the morning sky.

The two brightest planets in the Solar System were visible to the naked eye as they appeared over the UK this morning from around 6am, and were at their most visible by 7.15am.

Britain was one of the best places to see the conjunction, along with the US, as the planets appeared most clearly in the northern hemisphere.

Venus, which is the much smaller of the two planets, appeared larger and brighter due its closer proximity to Earth, being 162 million miles away compared to 365 million miles to Jupiter. 

Jupiter is by far the largest planet in the Solar System, measuring around 1,300 times the size of Earth, whereas Venus is roughly the same size at around 80 per cent of our planet's mass.

Viewers with a telescope would have also been able to see Jupiter's Galilean moons. 

The planet has over 60 moons that we know of, but its Galilean ones are the four largest, and named after the Italian astronomer and polymath, Galileo Galilei, who discovered them in the 1610.

As major planets orbit the sun in nearly the same plane from the point of view from Earth, they travel across our sky in roughly the same path.

Conjunctions happen when two planets share the same east-west longitude in the sky and Venus and Jupiter appear together in our sky around every 13 months, according to Space.com.

However conjunctions where the planets appear so close together are rare and only predicted to happen again a handful of times over the next century.

This morning the two planets were just 16 arcminutes, or half the width of the full moon, apart in the sky at times.

People took to social media soon after the planets appeared to share their images of the spectacle.