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Now You Can See 5 Planets At Once With The Naked Eye
Starting tomorrow, Jan 20th 2016, all five (of the visible) planets will be visible to the naked eye during the morning twilight. If you head outside to a good viewing point about an hour before sunrise you can catch a glimpse of Mercury, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, and Venus. [1]
This is the first time this alignment has happened in about a decade.
Mercury will be the toughest to spot given how dim it may appear, but the other four should be relatively easy to see under the right conditions, i.e. little cloud cover and light pollution.
Will you be able to see it from your location? Yes, unless you live in the North Pole.
You can catch all of these planets each morning until about mid-February. Should you miss this alignment during this period for whatever reason, you can observe it once again in August of 2016, when they will be aligned and visible once more.
For those of you who are knowledgable in the field of astronomy, you may know that eight planets are actually aligned during this time. The reason we can’t see all eight is because both Uranus and Neptune are too dim to observe with the naked eye (and the other planet that is aligned is the one you live on — unless you are an ET and are reading this from another planet).
All five planets are visible at once due to the fact that each planet’s position along its orbit lies to the right of the sun when viewed from above the solar system. So as the earth spins they will all be visible just before sunrise. This stargazing opportunity will end as soon as the sun rises, which is the last visible celestial body to rise in this alignment.
So depending on where you live, get up about an hour before sunrise, and see what you can see!
Joe Martino
The article Now You Can See 5 Planets At Once With The Naked Eye published by TheSleuthJournal – Real News Without Synthetics
Source: http://www.thesleuthjournal.com/now-you-can-see-5-planets-at-once-with-the-naked-eye/
