Get ready for a celestial show! A rare six-planet alignment will be visible in the early night sky in mid-January, offering a spectacular sight for skywatchers. While a seven-planet alignment is the maximum possible, this six-planet parade will feature Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.
Look up in mid-January just after sunset and you'll see a six-planet alignment : Four with your naked eye and two with a telescope. It's a six-planet parade! There are eight planets in our solar system and one dwarf planet (Pluto). Because we live on Earth, the most we could see is a maximum of seven planets total. However, they are not always in the same direction or sector, but rather scattered all around the solar system at varying positions around the sun.
In mid-January, all of the planets are on one side of the sun, except for Mercury, which is still on the other side of the sun. We will be one planet short of a maximum alignment. Six planets will still be possible to see in one ecliptic plane in the southern and eastern night sky, just after sunset: Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. We created a rough illustration on location and brightness of the planets for the nights of Jan. 17 and 18. NASA says those will be the best nights to see all six planets closer together before some disappear into the horizon while others start to appear. They do have differing magnitudes of brightness. The more negative you are, the brighter the object is, and thus easier for us to see. The more positive you are, the dimmer and object is, and thus harder for us to see. (Note: The objects on the magnitude scale show what we can see at different magnitudes to help put these numbers in perspective. Our unaided human eye can see a maximum of magnitude 6.0. The Hubble Space Telescope can see objects up to a magnitude of 27.0. The sun shines at a magnitude of -27.0.) Notice how they are not necessarily in a straight line from our perspective. That is because the planets orbit the sun in an ecliptic plane. This illustration is from a northern hemisphere mid-latitude (near Indianapolis). From our view, the line of planets looks more like an arc. We are looking at the plane from an angle. Alignments are actually fairly common. Two to four planet alignments can happen a few times a year, or a conjunction of two planets (two planets that appear close together). A six-planet alignment doesn't happen every single year, but it happens more often than you think. The last one we had was in June 2024. Seven-planet alignment (max we can possibly have) are more rare; however, we have one coming up in late February 2025. We've had a good amount of alignments recently. In ancient days, stargazers, astronomers and royal magicians would see alignments and make prophecies or decipher them as omens or the reason for certain natural disasters or other ills in society
Astronomy Six-Planet Alignment Planetary Alignment Stargazing Space Observation
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