Seven planets in the solar system — Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune — will line up in the night sky Friday (Feb. 28) in an incredibly rare “planetary parade.”
Although most of these planets have been visible in the night sky since January, Mercury will be joining the procession for just a few days, before Saturn gets lost in the sunset’s glare in early March.
Five of these worlds will be easily visible to the unaided eye, but you will need a good telescope to see the full show, according to NASA.
That’s because at least two of the planets — Uranus and Neptune — will be too dim to see with the naked eye and will likely be masked by the glare of the setting sun at twilight, NASA said. Saturn will also be trickier to see in some locations due to its position close to the horizon.
If you have a good telescope to catch the full display, the best time to view all seven planets in the Northern Hemisphere will be after sunset on Friday (Feb. 28) at around 8:30 p.m. local time, according to SkyatNightMagazine.
Related: Have all 8 planets ever aligned?
Planetary conjunctions occur when two or more planets appear to be close together in the sky. Of course, this is only from our perspective on Earth; in reality, the planets remain extremely far apart.
Conjunctions happen because the planets of the solar system orbit the sun along roughly the same flat plane as Earth, and they occasionally align when their different orbital distances and speeds bring them into a cluster on Earth’s nightside.
These conjunctions aren’t rare, but they do get rarer with each planet added to the chain. The three innermost planets — Mercury, Venus and Earth — align within 3.6 degrees in the sky every 39.6 years. For all of the solar system’s eight planets to align that closely, it would take 396 billion years — something that has never happened and won’t happen before the sun becomes a red giant, consuming Mercury, Venus and likely Earth in the process.
We recommend Time and Date and Stellarium as two great online tools for finding viewing dates and times based on where you are in the world. On mobile phones, Sky Tonight is a free app that will do the same job.
