28 Feb 2025: Seven planets will appear in the night sky at the same time, with Saturn, Mercury, Neptune, Venus, Uranus, Jupiter, and Mars in a line

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A Rare Alignment of 7 Planets Is Taking Place in The Sky This Week​

Michelle Starr
Mon, February 24, 2025 at 9:11 AM GMT+8
3 min read

Planetary Alignment Illustration

A very rare treat is about to grace Earth's night skies.

On the evening of 28 February 2025, all seven of the other planets in the Solar System will appear in the night sky at the same time, with Saturn, Mercury, Neptune, Venus, Uranus, Jupiter, and Mars all lining up in a neat row – a magnificent sky feast for the eyes known as a great planetary alignment.

It's not uncommon for a few planets to be on the same side of the Sun at the same time, but it's less common for most, or even all of the planets to align like this.

Any number of planets from three to eight constitutes an alignment. Five or six planets assembling is known as a large alignment, with five-planet alignments significantly more frequent than six.

Seven-planet great alignments are, of course, the rarest of all.

An illustration of the upcoming February planetary alignment as seen from the Northern Hemisphere. (Star Walk)
These alignments aren't the neat planetary queues you see in diagrams and illustrations of the Solar System. That's not a thing that actually happens in the real Universe, sadly.

Yet the planets do appear to arrange themselves along an imaginary line.

This occurs because the planets of the Solar System all orbit the Sun on a flat plane called the ecliptic. Some of the planets have orbits tilted slightly above or below this plane, but they're all more or less on the same level like grooves on a record thanks to the way stars like our Sun form.

A baby star in a cloud of material starts spinning; the cloud around them swirls into a flattish disk that feeds into the baby star around its equator.

Planets form from what remains of the disk and, if left uninterrupted by other gravitational influences, will remain orbiting in that level position.

Occasionally, the planets will be on the same side of the Sun as they move along their orbits, so we get to see them in the sky at the same time. This is what will grace the sky on the evening of February 28.

Whether you will be able to see the alignments, at what time the planets rise and set, and in which order, depends on where in the world you're viewing from.

There are tools you can access to get those times and sky locations.

Time and Date has an interactive tool that allows you to set the date you want to view, showing the rise and set times for each planet, where in the sky they can be seen, and how difficult they will be to see.

Stellarium has a similar web tool that shows you the positions of all the planets.

Sky Tonight is a free mobile app that uses your phone's hardware to gauge where you are located, and shows you real-time positions of celestial objects on a map of the sky above. There is a good list of other options here, too.

You will need some binoculars or a telescope to see the planets in all their glory, so if you haven't already, start planning now. And keep your fingers crossed for clear skies!

An earlier version of this article was published in January 2025.

 

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A very rare event will be visible in the night sky.

On the evening of 28 February 2025, all seven of the other planets in the Solar System will appear in the night sky at the same time, with Saturn, Mercury, Neptune, Venus, Uranus, Jupiter, and Mars all lining up in a neat row.

 

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Planetary parade: Mercury falls into line for rare seven-planet alignment​

The seven will appear to form a straight line in the night sky in display that won’t be seen again until 2040

www.theguardian.com

Seven planets will appear to align in the night sky on the last day of February in what is known as a planetary parade.

These planetary hangouts happen when several planets appear to line up in the night sky at once.

“A planetary parade is a moment when multiple planets are visible in the sky at the same time,” said Dr Greg Brown, an astronomer at the Royal Observatory Greenwich, told PA Media. “How impressive a parade it is will depend on how many planets are in it and how visible they are.”

This week, all seven planets are technically visible in the sky at once, though they are not all equally easy to spot.

“Mercury, Neptune and Saturn are all very close to the horizon in the early evening and, particularly in the case of Neptune and Saturn, will struggle to be seen in the twilight,” Brown said. “In addition, Uranus, like Neptune, is very faint, making it almost impossible to find without a pair of binoculars or a telescope.

“Venus, Jupiter and Mars, however, are all very easy to see with the unaided eye.”

A parade of four or five planets visible to the naked eye happens every few years, according to Nasa.

The sun lighting the sides of Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars. Photograph: Alamy/PA
“Groups of three, four or even five planets being visible aren’t uncommon, regularly appearing throughout each year,” Brown said. “But the more planets are involved, the more things need to be aligned to be visible at once. This makes full seven-planet parades fairly rare.”

The seven planets will next align in 2040.

A similar parade took place last June, but only two planets could be seen without any special equipment. Six planets were visible in January – four to the naked eye – and now a dim Mercury joins the gang.

This month, Venus, Mars and Jupiter are visible to the naked eye. A faint Saturn and Mercury are close to the horizon, making them hard to spot. Uranus and Neptune can be glimpsed with binoculars and telescopes.

“Planetary alignments occur because the planets in our solar system orbit the Sun within roughly the same plane, known as the ecliptic plane,” Dr Shyam Balaji, a researcher in astroparticle physics and cosmology at King’s College London, said. “As they orbit at different speeds and distances from the Sun, there are moments when they appear to line up from Earth’s perspective.”

Balaji said the best time to see the alignment in the UK was 28 February, “shortly after sunset, when the planets will be positioned above the western horizon”. The same is true in Australia, where stargazers should look north after sunset, and the US, with experts suggesting those hoping to see the celestial show should head out about 30 minutes after sunset and stay away from bright lights.

Stargazing apps can help people find out where to look just after sunset around the world.

To find the planets with a telescope, look for moon shapes, Brown said. “Using a telescope, try looking for the moons of Jupiter or the shape of the illuminated part of Venus’s surface – like a tiny crescent moon.”

The planets will slowly make their exit through the spring.

With PA Media

 

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You will never see these fake planets in a telescope. These fake planets are just CGI