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Tomorrow evening, a unique solar event will occur in the night sky.
Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Uranus, and Mars will all line up near the moon, giving stargazers an extraordinary sight.
The sight of the five planets will stretch from the horizon line to about halfway up the sky. However, Mercury and Jupiter will quickly fall below the horizon about a half-hour post-sunset, so be sure you time it just right.
Cameron Hummels, a computational astrophysicist at the California Institute of Technology, told CNN that the planets will appear “kind of like pearls on a necklace.”
As NASA astronomer Bill Cooke advised, look towards the western horizon right after sunset.
With clear skies and a view of the western horizon, the parade can be seen anywhere on our planet.
“That’s the beauty of these planetary alignments. It doesn’t take much,” Cooke told the Associated Press
Also, Jupiter, Venus, and Mars light up brightly, so they’ll be easy to spot in the sky. Mercury and Uranus will be dimmer, so you might need binoculars to spot the two planets.
The “evening star” Venus will be one of the brightest things you'll see when looking up at the sky, and Mars will have a reddish glow which can be spotted near the moon.
Uranus usually isn’t visible in the skies, so seeing its green glow just above Venus is a rare opportunity for “planet collectors,” Cooke said.
Astronomy apps like Sky Tonight or SkySafari will make it easy to identify the planets.
An alignment like this happens when the planets’ orbits line up on one side of the sun from Earth’s perspective and are in the same constellation.
This alignment appears every couple of years and is less common.
Source: New York Post