Baghdad today – follow up
Seeing the planets of the Solar System aligned in a neat line is one of many amazing stargazing experiences we can spot — and this month we may have the opportunity to see them with our own eyes, RT reports.
As of mid-month, when viewed from the northern hemisphere, you’ll see Saturn, Mars, Venus, and Jupiter lined up in near-perfect planetary alignment in the pre-dawn sky.
The alignment begins to form from around April 17, but will be at its best on the morning of April 20. As enthusiastic stargazers likely know, Saturn, Mars and Venus have actually clustered together since late March, but Jupiter won’t join until mid-April.
A few days later – around April 23 – the alignment is set to get even more exciting, with the moon lining up to join the right and when the celestial bodies line up like that, it only happens in Earth’s sky of course. Viewed from a different location in space, the location of each planet would be completely different.
The solar system is effectively flat, with each planet orbiting the sun within the same plane, so any perceptible alignment is just a trick of perspective, depending on space and time.
However, planetary alignments are amazing, and they don’t happen often – at least not with alignments that include many planets like this.
However, this month’s alignment, while rare in its own right, is really just the start of a much more remarkable event scheduled to happen in June of this year.
On June 24, all the other planets in the solar system – Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and Uranus – will be joined together in a larger planetary alignment, and although you’ll likely need binoculars or a telescope, the alignment will also extend over a larger section of the sky, making Difficult to distinguish or photograph.
Despite these challenges, major planet alignments like this one, visible to the human eye, are very rare, and have only happened three times since 2005, so you don’t want to miss them.