Artist’s impression of a planetary alignment event, not to scale. | buradaki/Getty Images
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.
Read more here.