A Spectacular Alignment of 7 Planets Is About to Occur in the Sky : ScienceAlert

A very rare treat is about to grace Earth’s night sky.

On the evening of February 28, 2025, all seven of the other planets in the Solar System will appear in the night sky at the same time, with Saturn, MercuryNeptune, Venus, Uranus, Jupiterand Mars everything lined up in a neat row – a beautiful heavenly feast for the eyes known as a good planetary alignment.

But that’s not all. Between now and then, on 21 January 2025, six of the other seven planets will appear in the sky in a great alignment – Mars, Jupiter, Uranus, Neptune, Venus, and Saturn, except for Mercury.

In fact, it is common for some planets to be on the same side of the Sun at the same time, but less common for most, or even all planets to align.

Any number of planets from three to eight constitutes an alignment. Five or six planets assembling is known as a grand alignment, with five planet alignments more frequent than six.

The seven-planet grand alignment is, of course, the most unusual of all.

These alignments are not the neat planetary queues you see diagrams and illustrations in the Solar System. that’s it not something that actually happens in the real Universe, unfortunately.

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But the planets seem to arrange themselves along an imaginary line.

This happens because the planets in the Solar System all revolve around the Sun in a flat plane called the ecliptic. Some of the planets have orbits slightly tilted above or below this plane, but they are all more or less at the same level as the grooves of a record thanks to the way the stars are shaped like on our Day.

The baby star in the cloud of material begins to spin; the cloud around them spirals into a flat disk that feeds the baby star around its equator.

Planets form from the rest of the disk and, if not disturbed by other gravitational influences, will remain orbiting in that level position.

Sometimes, 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 how beautiful the sky will be on the nights of January 21 and February 28.

How to see

Whether you can see the alignments, when the planets rise and set, and in what order, depends on where in the world you are looking.

There are tools you can access to get times and locations in the sky.

Time and Date there is an interactive tool that allows you to set the date you want to look at, showing the rise and set times for each planet, where in the sky they appear, and how difficult they are to see.

Stellarium there is a similar web tool that shows you the positions of all the planets.

Heaven Tonight is a free mobile app that uses your phone’s hardware to measure where you are, and shows you the real-time positions of celestial objects on the sky map above. There is one good list of other options heretoo.

You’ll need some binoculars or a telescope to see the planets in all their glory, so if you don’t already have one, start planning now. And keep your fingers crossed for clear skies.