Five Major Planets Will Be In Alignment And Visible In The Night Sky This Weekend

Lovers of the night sky are in for a rare treat this weekend. If clear skies prevail then five of the major planets should be visible to the naked eye.

This is an event that occurs approximately once each year when Saturn, Neptune, Jupiter, Uranus and Mercury will be in alignment. Depending on your location, this phenomenon can be observed from Earth on Saturday, June 17, and Sunday 18.

As recommended by the experts, for the best viewing it is better to find a spot with no light pollution and a clear view of the horizon. The quality of viewing will also depend on whether you are located in the Northern or Southern Hemisphere.

Saturn, Jupiter and Mercury should be visible to the naked eye but the use of binoculars would make it a lot easier to look at Uranus and Neptune, as they are further away.

One of the keys to recognising these celestial bodies is that Mercury will be the last one to appear, about an hour before sunrise.

Mercury will be closest to the Moon in the early hours of Saturday while Saturn will be visible higher in the sky until the Sun fully rises. This alignment of the five planets will not take place again until April 2024 and previously occurred on June 24, 2022.

According to experts, to differentiate between stars and planets, observers must look for objects whose brightness is not intermittent but rather uniform or constant.

Seeing stars flickering in the sky is the result of their being a great distance away. That means any turbulence or atmospheric residue alters the amount of light that reaches us.

This is something that planets more distinguishable from stars, although they obviously do not have their own light.

How to view this galactic display

To find out exactly where to look in the sky, the Stellarium website is a good source to consult. It displays the location and times at which each planet will be in the area and shows the alignment in which the five planets will be visible.

Another option is to download the Sky Tonight app, which allows you to point your mobile phone at the sky to see what is happening at that moment in real-time.

Despite what is portrayed in science fiction films, – usually linked to catastrophic events – the planets of our solar system never align in a perfectly straight line.

In a two-dimensional graph of the planets and their orbits, it looks like all the planets revolve around the same line. The reality though is that they do not all orbit in the same plane. Instead, they revolve in different orbits in three-dimensional space.

Planetary alignment depends on where they are viewed from. If three planets are in the same region of the sky from the Earth’s point of view, they are not necessarily in the same region of the sky from the point of view of the Sun, the Moon, or another planet.

As a result, the alignment is a partial vision of reality that, by coincidence in this case, is seen from our planet, as reported by larazon.es.