Earlier this week, on Monday night (1st December), the planets Venus and Jupiter aligned with a crescent moon, to form a celestial smiley face for viewers in Australia (in Europe and the Americas, these three celestial bodies formed a frowning face).

In the photo below, the planets Venus (top left) and Jupiter (right) form the eyes, and the Moon forms the mouth of a smiley face.

the Moon, Venus and Jupiter

back yard, Western Australia
Canon EOS 50D, 70-200mm f/4L @200mm, 1/15 sec, f/5.6, ISO320

Apparently the next time these planets and the moon will be so close in the sky is in November 2052, although Venus and the crescent moon will be close together again on New Years Eve.

To provide some scale, the distances from the earth to these two planets and the Moon were as follows on Monday night:

body	AU	km	miles
Moon	0.0027AU	0.40 million km	0.25 million miles
Venus	1.005AU	151 million km	93 million miles
Jupiter	5.807AU	870 million km	540 million miles

1AU is a unit of measure called an astronomical unit, and it's equal to the distance from the Earth to the Sun, with an approximate value of 150 million km (93 million miles).

These distances were calculated using the distance information from Stellarium, free open-source planetarium software for your computer, using the planet locations at approximately 9pm on Monday night.
If you're interested in stargazing and astronomy, I can highly recommend Stellarium.