All seven of the other planets in our solar system are about to become visible at once in a great planetary alignment – here’s how to spot the celestial show
By Leah Crane
20 January 2025
All the planets will appear to line up across the sky towards the end of February
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All of our solar system’s planets are lining up to parade through the night sky at once. This extraordinary celestial event will see the sky scattered with seven visible planets in what is known as a great planetary alignment.
The eight planets in our solar system orbit the sun in roughly the same plane, because they all originally formed from the same disc of debris around the sun. The line the sun traces across the daytime sky, called the ecliptic, aligns with this plane, so when the planets appear in the sky, they all appear roughly along the ecliptic. It isn’t a perfect line of planets, because their orbits are tilted slightly, but it is fairly close.
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Never is this more apparent than during a planetary alignment. An alignment including all of the planets except Mercury is taking place in mid-January. Uranus and Neptune, being the most distant planets, will only be visible through a telescope, but you may be able to spot the others with the naked eye.
The great alignment, including Mercury, will only happen for a few evenings around 28 February, depending on your location. All seven planets will be visible briefly right after sunset, stretching in an arc across the sky.
By the time the sky is completely dark, Mercury and Saturn will have sunk below the horizon, with Neptune and Venus following shortly after. The best time to spot the planets will be in the hour after sunset, when all of them except Mars, Jupiter and Uranus will be close to the horizon. Those three will continue to hang around for most of the night, but spotting three planets in the sky isn’t nearly as rare as finding all seven.