Family Reunion: All Seven Non-Earth Planets to Appear in Night Sky Together Wednesday Night
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After decades of referring to nine planets in the solar system, the discovery of more Kuiper Belt Objects beyond Pluto set off a bitter debate in the 2000s about the definition of a planet, which resulted in Pluto getting cut from the roster.
The gang’s all here! All seven of the Earth’s sibling planets are set to make a rare appearance together in the night sky on Wednesday.
Just after sunset on the night of December 28, from west to east, Earthlings will be able to see Venus, Mercury, Saturn, Neptune, Jupiter, Uranus, and Mars, as well as the minor planets Pluto and Vesta, and of course the moon, acting as a sort of stand-in for Earth in the cosmic family portrait.
There's a rare astronomical event in the night sky this week, something that doesn't happen but every few decades, and it's pretty cool. Even better, you don't need any special equipment to see it.
— Phil (I have a SubStack link in bio) Plait (@BadAstronomer) December 26, 2022
All the planets in the solar system are visible in the sky at the same time! pic.twitter.com/4kx70kncES
Some will be very bright, such as Venus, Mercury, Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars, while the rest will require binoculars or a telescope to be seen.
Most of them have been visible in the night sky already in recent days and weeks, but Venus and Mercury, the two planets closer to the sun than the Earth, were too close to it to be visible to an Earth observer. Now they’ll appear just above the horizon, just after the sun ducks behind it.
Such an arrangement of planets hasn’t happened since June, which was a particularly rare close alignment that hadn’t occurred for 18 years. However, such group photos are typically possible every few years.
However, that alignment is just a matter of perspective, and only appears to someone standing here on Earth - a phenomenon called parallax. It would not be viewable to someone anywhere else in our solar system. And no, it won’t change your luck.
The astronomical event calls to memory the famous "Family Portrait" photos snapped by the Voyager 1 probe as it left the solar system in 1990. Each planet, including Earth, appears as nothing more than a dot of light, and the sun as little more than a bright star, causing NASA astrophysicist Carl Sagan to muse about the pettiness of political disputes over the "Pale Blue Dot" of Earth.
