


This solar event will rock all your worlds.
A rare parade of five planets will be visible in the night sky on Tuesday evening, so keep your eyes on the sky.
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Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Uranus and Mars will all line up near the moon, giving stargazers a chance to spot an extraordinary sight.
The five planets will stretch from the horizon line to about halfway up the sky — but Mercury and Jupiter will quickly fall below the horizon about a half hour post-sunset, so make sure you time it right.
Cameron Hummels, a computational astrophysicist at the California Institute of Technology, told CNN that the planets will appear “kind of like pearls on a necklace.”
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NASA astronomer Bill Cooke advised looking toward the western horizon right after sunset.
As long as you have clear skies and a view of the western horizon, the parade can be seen from anywhere on our planet.
“That’s the beauty of these planetary alignments. It doesn’t take much,” Cooke told the Associated Press.
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Jupiter, Venus and Mars light up brightly, so they’ll be easy to see, but Mercury and Uranus will be a little dimmer, so they might require binoculars to spot.
Venus — often referred to as the “evening star” — will be one of the brightest things when you look at the sky, and Mars will have a reddish glow and can be spotted near the moon.
Uranus usually isn’t visible in the skies, so seeing its green glow just above Venus is a rare opportunity for “planet collectors,” Cooke said.
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Astronomy apps such as Sky Tonight or SkySafari make it easy for sky lovers to identify the planets.
An alignment like this occurs when the planets’ orbits line up on one side of the sun from Earth’s perspective and are located in the same constellation.
This kind of alignment appears every few years and is less common than those that have two or three planets. It happened last year and in 2020 and 2016.