Unlike the current blockbuster movie, it's hardly a "war of the worlds" in the night sky, but there are great celestial clashes in the sky tonight.

Actually, I prefer to call them celestial hugs, but they are more formally known as conjunctions.

Conjunctions occur when astronomical bodies - such as the moon, planets, or bright stars - get close to each other in the heavens. Now, of course, they're not actually physically close together. Rather they are in nearly the same line of sight from our view on Earth.

The stars we see night after night are a long ways away … light years away. In fact, just one light year is almost 6 trillion miles.

As the Earth rotates on its axis and revolves around the sun, and the nighttime side of the Earth faces different directions in space, it appears to us that all of the stars and constellations in the entire celestial sphere move together across our skies.

The planets in our solar system though are much, much closer to our backyards and are moving at various speed around our sun. That causes them to wander among the backdrop of distant stars, sometimes butting up next to a bright star or each other.

The Earth's moon obediently circles around our world every 27.3 days, making it appear to race eastward even faster among the background stars. In fact, our lunar companion constantly has conjunctions with bright stars and planets.

One place to keep up with some of the better and more beautiful conjunctions is at my Web site:

www.lynchandthestars

.com.

On Sunday night, there will be a close encounter between a nearly full moon and the bright brick red star, Antares. They will almost be touching each other! Look after evening twilight in the southeastern sky and you'll see Antares less than a degree - or less than a finger width at arm's length - to the upper left of Antares.

Antares is the brightest star in the great constellation Scorpius the Scorpion, one of the few constellations that actually looks like what it's supposed to be. Antares lies at the heart of the beast. Lots of folks also refer to Scorpius as "the giant fishhook," trolling the southern summer celestial sea. Even with the naked eye you can easily see Antares' reddish hue.

Astronomically, it's a huge, bloated red giant star over 600 light years away, using the last of its hydrogen fuel. It's over 6 billion miles in diameter. Our own sun is less than a million miles across.

Think about this as you look at this great celestial hug between Antares and the moon. According to my rough math, if you were to clone the moon you see tonight over 252,000 trillion times, you would have just about enough moons to fill Antares.