About a week ago, my mom texted our whole family’s group text “I hope everyone is excited to wake up early tomorrow, I sure am”. Confused, I responded asking her what was going on. She wrote back “to see a very rare cosmic occurrence of course - the planetary alignment!” I then looked up the information about it and must say I was pretty surprised that it was even a thing, but in fact it is, and it happened this year and won’t happen again until 2040.
The planetary alignment features 5 planets - Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn - in near a near perfect line across the early morning sky. This is occurring because the orbits of these planets has come together in close unison along the plane of the Solar System, which is rare given the distance apart and great difference in orbiting time that all of the planets have. The best viewing dates were between June 24th and June 26th, so unfortunately the most ideal time has now passed. But the planets are still visible in close proximity to one another.
The best viewing time to see this phenomenon was just before sunrise. Chicago time, that would have been at around 5am so I did not want to get up at the crack of dawn to see it. I’m good with looking at pictures on the internet afterwards! In the Northern Hemisphere, the viewing angle was just to the Southeast, while in the Southern Hemisphere it was slightly to the Northeast. Well, I guess see you again in 2040 for the next one!
