'Planet parade' 2025: See the ultra-rare planetary alignment peak this week, before Saturn gets swallowed by the sunset

News
By published

A stunning "parade of planets" will grace the night sky this week, with all seven of Earth's celestial neighbors joining the show. Here's how to spot it and why it happens.

An artist's illustration of the solar system's planets in alignment.
An artist's illustration of the solar system's planets in alignment. (Image credit: NASA via Getty Images)

Seven planets in the solar system — Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune — will line up in the night sky Friday (Feb. 28) in an incredibly rare "planetary parade."

Although most of these planets have been visible in the night sky since January, Mercury will be joining the procession for just a few days, before Saturn gets lost in the sunset's glare in early March.

That's because at least two of the planets — Uranus and Neptune — will be too dim to see with the naked eye and will likely be masked by the glare of the setting sun at twilight, NASA said. Saturn will also be trickier to see in some locations due to its position close to the horizon.

If you have a good telescope to catch the full display, the best time to view all seven planets in the Northern Hemisphere will be after sunset on Friday (Feb. 28) at around 8:30 p.m. local time, according to SkyatNightMagazine.

Related: Have all 8 planets ever aligned?

Planetary conjunctions occur when two or more planets appear to be close together in the sky. Of course, this is only from our perspective on Earth; in reality, the planets remain extremely far apart.

Conjunctions happen because the planets of the solar system orbit the sun along roughly the same flat plane as Earth, and they occasionally align when their different orbital distances and speeds bring them into a cluster on Earth's nightside.

These conjunctions aren't rare, but they do get rarer with each planet added to the chain. The three innermost planets — Mercury, Venus and Earth — align within 3.6 degrees in the sky every 39.6 years. For all of the solar system's eight planets to align that closely, it would take 396 billion years — something that has never happened and won't happen before the sun becomes a red giant, consuming Mercury, Venus and likely Earth in the process.

We recommend Time and Date and Stellarium as two great online tools for finding viewing dates and times based on where you are in the world. On mobile phones, Sky Tonight is a free app that will do the same job.

Ben Turner
Ben Turner
Acting Trending News Editor

Ben Turner is a U.K. based writer and editor at Live Science. He covers physics and astronomy, tech and climate change. He graduated from University College London with a degree in particle physics before training as a journalist. When he's not writing, Ben enjoys reading literature, playing the guitar and embarrassing himself with chess.

You must confirm your public display name before commenting

Please logout and then login again, you will then be prompted to enter your display name.