A very unusual feast is about to grace Earth’s night skies.
On the night of February 28, 2025, all seven of the solar system’s other planets will appear in the night sky at the same time, with Saturn, Mercury, Neptune, Venus, Uranus, Jupiter, and Mars all lined up neatly. Rows – A spectacular sky feast for the eyes, known as a spectacular planetary alignment.
But that’s not all. From now until January 21, 2025, six of the seven planets (excluding Mercury): Mars, Jupiter, Uranus, Neptune, Venus, and Saturn will appear simultaneously in the sky in large arrays.
In reality, it’s not uncommon for several planets to be on the same side of the sun at the same time, but it’s less common for most, or even all, planets to be in line.
Any number of planets from three to eight can make up an array. Gatherings of five or six planets are known as massive alignments, and five-planet alignments are much more frequent than six-planet alignments.
Of course, the great alignment of the seven planets is the rarest of all.
These configurations are not neat planetary alignments like you see in the movies. diagrams and illustrations of the solar system. it is not what actually happens Sadly, in the real universe.
Still, the planets appear to be aligned along imaginary lines. This happens because all the planets in our solar system orbit around the sun. on a plane called ecliptic. Some planets have orbits tilted slightly above or below this plane, but thanks to the way stars like the Sun form, they’re all more or less on the same level, like the grooves on a record.
A baby star inside a cloud of matter begins to rotate. The surrounding clouds swirl into a flat disk that flows into the baby star near the equator. The planet forms from the rest of the disk and continues to orbit in its horizontal position unless interrupted by other gravitational influences.
In some cases, the planets are on the same side of the sun as they move along their orbits, so we can see them in the sky at the same time. This is what will decorate the sky on the nights of January 21st and February 28th.
How to watch
Your ability to see the times and order in which the planets rise and set depends on where in the world you are looking from. There are tools you can access to get these times and sky positions.
time and date has an interactive tool that lets you set the dates you want to see, and shows you each planet’s rise and set times, where it will be visible in the sky, and how difficult it will be to see.
Stellarium has a similar web tool that displays the positions of all planets.
sky tonight is a free mobile app that uses your phone’s hardware to measure your location and display the positions of celestial objects on a map of the sky in real time. There is Here is a good list of other optionstoo.
You’ll need binoculars or a telescope to see the planet in all its glory, so if you don’t already have one, start planning now. Good luck and aim for clear skies.
