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The grand illusion: As six orbs appear to align, get ready to enjoy planet parade

By Scott Hewitt, Columbian staff reporter
Published: January 14, 2025, 6:06am
3 Photos
This Aug. 26, 2003, image made available by NASA shows Mars as it lines up with the sun and the Earth.
This Aug. 26, 2003, image made available by NASA shows Mars as it lines up with the sun and the Earth. (Associated Press files) Photo Gallery

Who doesn’t love a parade? Even planets do.

Later this month and into February, six of our solar system’s eight planets will snap to attention and march in something like a long, bent line — or two separate line segments, anyway — from east to west across the early evening sky. While they’ll be doing that for many weeks, Jan. 21 marks the peak of what’s called a planetary alignment, which simply means a bunch of planets assembling in the same section of sky.

They may look like they’re arranged in tight formation. But remember, that’s a grand illusion. The planets’ orbits around the sun are concentric ovals of cosmically different sizes, so any planets that appear side-by-side to us are actually separated by millions, or even billions, of miles of deep space.

It’s like seeing two or more traffic lights ahead of you on the same road. The lights may appear very few degrees apart to your eye, but your perspective-practiced brain can tell that the first one is mere yards away while the next is hundreds of yards farther away, and so on into the distance.

When just two heavenly bodies appear to pull close together in the sky, it’s called a conjunction. When a whole gaggle of planets manage the trick, that’s planetary alignment — informally known as a planet parade.

This winter’s parade is going to be a doozy, said Jim Todd, the director of space science education at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry. Sharing the evening sky this winter will be six planets. Not all of these cosmically distant bodies can be seen without binoculars, if not a telescope, but some can.

Join the parade!

Here’s how to track the whole parade.

Start by scanning the southern sky right after sunset (at 5:02 p.m. Jan. 21), which is when planets already in the sky — but hidden by sunlight — will start to emerge.

Leading the way in the southwest will be brilliant Venus. Venus never appears very far from the sun, whether rising or setting, since it is closer to the sun than we are. (Earth’s average distance from the sun is 91 million miles; Venus’ average distance is 67 million miles.) Because of that proximity, and because it’s thickly blanketed by reflective cloud cover, Venus tends to be the most attention-grabbing planet up there. That’s why it’s nicknamed both “morning star” and “evening star.”

On Jan. 21, gleaming Venus will follow the sun to the west and disappear below the horizon just after 9 p.m.

Barely below Venus in the sky will be slightly dimmer, yellower Saturn. Supergiant Saturn is vastly larger but fantastically farther than Venus — about 750 million miles away from Earth on Jan. 21 — so its colorful stripes and gorgeous ring system will make for jaw-dropping viewing only through a telescope. Without one, decent binoculars should at least help you make out the oddly oblong shape, which is the planet surrounded by those sprawling, horizontal rings. Saturn sets just before 9 p.m.

Neptune, the most distant planet from the sun (and Earth, at an unimaginable 2.8 billion miles on Jan. 21) cannot be seen without the assistance of powerful binoculars, if not a telescope. If you’ve got either of those, the blue-green planet will emerge after sunset to the upper left of Venus, in the south-southwest, and will set just before 10 p.m.

Now, turn farther to your left — toward the south-southeast — to try glimpsing Uranus (the planet with the unavoidably funny name). And good luck with that. Uranus is also very distant (about 1.7 billion miles from Earth now) and very faint. A telescope is mandatory. If you’ve got one, Uranus will be another pale blue-green spot. (A really powerful scope would reveal a planet seeming to roll around on its side, with stripes oriented vertically, not horizontally.)

Red planet Mars might just be the star of this winter parade. It is reaching what’s called opposition right now. Opposition means an outer planet appears directly opposite the sun, with Earth in between. Planets in opposition tend to be brightly reflective (especially at midnight) and easy to spot, and that can stay true for weeks afterward.

Spot the distinctly rust-hued Mars in the north-northeast on Jan. 21, and you’ll be able to keep tracking it much of the rest of the year. Mars will stay visible in the night sky through early August.

The reigning giant of all the planets, Jupiter, reached its own very visible opposition point last month, and it’ll keep shining up there through the end of May. On Jan 21, Jupiter will emerge in the east — higher up and to the right of Mars — just after sunset Jan. 21.

Try an app

As you can (struggle to) see, planets can be challenging to spot, even while parading in formation. The handiest way to track down the most distant of those marchers is with a stargazing cellphone app. If you haven’t used one of these, you may find the experience miraculous and even a little vertiginous, as you point your screen upward and see a sky full of information — from names and numbers to orbital pathways and outlines of constellations.

It’s worth checking out online reviews of stargazing apps. Some are basic and free while others require a nominal purchase or even an annual subscription. The latter might provide a lot more data than you need. How wonky a stargazer are you? Even the simplest stargazing app will help you locate the objects you want to train your binoculars or telescope upon both near and very, very far away.

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