The planets are about to align and put on a rare celestial show.
Mercury, Venus, Saturn, Mars and Jupiter, the five bright planets, will all be visible from Earth as they appear in an angled line starting Wednesday, Jan. 20. The site will appear just before dawn in a line that stretches from high in the north to low in the east though Feb. 20.
This marks the all the planets will be able to be seen with the nake eye, according to EarthSky.
“There are that can be seen without any equipment,” Dr. Alan Duffy of Swinburne University in Melbourne, Australia told Australian Geographic. This will be one of them.
Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn have all lit up the nighttime sky since the beginning of the year. Mercury, however, was the missing piece of the puzzle.
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While Mercury will begin a faint object in the low sky, it will continue to shift further into sight until it parks itself right below a glowing Venus.
Dr. Tanya Hill, the senior curator at the Melbourne Planetarium, said there will be another chance to catch the five-planet lineup again this year in August, but after that, it will not be visible again until October 2018.
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