Heavenly! 5 planets to align in extremely rare astronomical dance
January 20, 2016 09:43
Morning people and skywatchers, take heed! For the next few weeks, five of the brightest planets in our solar system will be visible to the naked eye in the pre-dawn sky.
Mercury, Venus, Saturn, Mars and Jupiter will all be visible across the sky for the first time in more than a decade. You will also be able to see the stars Spica and Antares.
The planets can best be seen about an hour before sunrise from January 20 through the end of February.
This is the first time five planets have been aligned in a night sky since January 2005.
Dr Alan Duffy, research fellow at Swinburne University in Melbourne, told the Australian Geographic that this rare alignment is essentially a quirk of the universe.
All five visible planets to happen to line up is 'something well worth seeing,' he said.
The reason for the unusual astronomical sight is that the five planets happen to be on the same side of the sun at the same time, he further explained.
That means the planets can all be seen in the morning, rather than some of them being visible in the evening. Because all the planets sit on a single plane, and were looking at them from inside that plane, they will all appear to be sitting in a line.
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