For five consecutive mornings, beginning on Aug. 17, early risers will be treated to the sight of a “planet parade” in the eastern sky featuring Jupiter, Venus, Mercury and the moon. Uranus and Neptune will also be in the sky but not visible. Best seen about an hour before sunrise, the highlight will be on Wednesday, Aug. 20, when a slender crescent moon will shine very close to a brilliant Venus.
Venus and Jupiter will shine close to each other above due east, with Mercury becoming visible beneath them closer to sunrise.
Saturn is high in the south, with Neptune just above. Uranus is high in the southeast, but like Neptune, requires a telescope to see. You don’t need anything but your naked eyes to see this “planet parade.”
Joining the “planet parade” all week is a waning crescent moon, which will get slimmer on each successive morning and pass close to the Venus, Jupiter and Mercury later in the week.
Mars is the solitary planet left in the evening sky, so isn’t part of this “planet parade.”
Here’s what to expect this week as the “planet parade” peaks:
You’ll hear the erroneous term “planetary alignment” used to describe this event, along with advice about seeing six planets despite only four being visible to the naked eye. Stargazers prefer “planet parade.” That’s because the planets aren’t aligned in space — they just appear that way from our vantage point on Earth. The planets are spread out, as they always are, along the ecliptic — the plane of the solar system. If you think of the solar system as a fried egg, with the sun at the center, the planets (including Earth) orbit in a circle around it. If planets were truly aligned, they would all appear as a single point of light as seen from Earth. Alignment in astronomy typically refers to syzygy, such as an eclipse, which does not apply here.
Though these planets appear close in the sky, they’re separated by staggering distances. Venus is around 118 million miles (190 million kilometers) from Earth this week, while Jupiter is almost five times farther at 548 million miles (882 million kilometers), with distant Saturn 888 million miles (1,430 million kilometers). Mercury, the closest, is about 80 million miles (128 million kilometers) away. A “planet parade” is purely a line-of-sight phenomenon.
The “planet parade” will come to an end around Aug. 21 when Mercury slips into the sun’s glare, leaving only Saturn, Venus and Jupiter on show. However, it will be worth taking a look early on Aug. 31, when Venus will meet the Beehive Cluster in the early morning twilight. The next sky highlight — particularly for those with a backyard telescope — is Saturn at opposition on Sept. 21, 2025. With Earth between Saturn and the sun, the ringed planet will appear at its largest, brightest, and best in 2025, visible from dusk through dawn.