How to See Six Planets Lined Up in the Night Sky This Month—and Glimpse a Rare Seven-Planet ‘Parade’ in February

While the planets are technically always “aligned” along the same plane in our sky, seeing so many at once is a special opportunity

Sara Hashemi | Daily Correspondent

January 23, 2025

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The night sky will offer stargazers a special sight for the next several weeks: Right now, all planets except Mercury can be seen after sundown—then, in late February, the missing planet will join the line-up.

While the planets technically always appear along the same rough line in our sky, the fact that so many can be seen at once is noteworthy, according to NASA. Six planets are currently located above the horizon after dark—Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn are all visible to the naked eye, but you’ll need a telescope or binoculars to see Uranus and Neptune, the most distant planets. Then, with the addition of Mercury around February 28, all seven other planets will be together in the night sky.

However, the planets won’t actually form a perfect line. “You can draw a line that’s an arc, but it’s not an alignment like what you would have in your mind,” explains Parshati Patel, an astrophysicist and science communicator with Stellar Dreams, to CBC News.

In reality, the event is more about our perspective than the planets’ literal placement—if the planets actually aligned with each other in space, “that would be called a syzygy and that’s a much, much rarer event,” Kate Pattle, an astronomer at University College London, said to CNN’s Jacopo Prisco during a similar alignment last year.

The eight planets in our solar system all orbit the sun in roughly the same flat plane, known as the ecliptic—but they move at different speeds. Earth, for instace, takes about 365 days to complete one orbit; Mercury takes roughly 88 days, while Neptune takes nearly 165 years. That plane of planetary motion forms a line across our sky, and the planets always appear to travel across it.

Right now, “they happen to all be in their orbits on the same side of our sun, within the same degrees in our sky, so that we can see them,” says Rebecca Allen, an astrophysicist at Swinburne University in Australia, to the Guardian’s Petra Stock. “That is special.”

Even if the planetary alignment is more of a planetary coincidence, it’ll still be worth spending a few minutes looking up to the sky after sunset. Allen recommends using a basic sky map, available on many phone apps. Saturn and Venus will appear in the west, while Mars will lie in the east and Jupiter will shine overhead. Uranus and Neptune, though not naked-eye visible, will be between Jupiter and the western planets.

“Yes, you can go on Google and get a more spectacular view of all these planets,” says Jenifer Millard, a science communicator and astronomer at Fifth Star Labs, to Jonathan O’Callaghan of the BBC. “But when you’re looking at these objects, these are photons that have traveled millions or billions of miles through space to hit your retinas.”

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Sara Hashemi is a science writer and fact-checker currently based in New York City. Her work has appeared in Sierra, The Body, Maisonneuve magazine and more.