🌅 Today’s stat: 7

SOURCE

NASA

WHAT TO KNOW

• Seven planets in our solar system—Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune—are currently visible in the night sky, with the prime time for viewing being shortly after sunset local time (seeing Neptune will take some preparation, however, as the sun’s twilight blocks it from view and the planet falls below the horizon by the time it gets really dark). Online tools like Time and Date and Stellarium, and mobile apps like Night Sky and Sky Tonight, will help you spot the celestial bodies.

WHY IT MATTERS

• Six of the planets have been visible since January, though Mercury is joining the procession for only a few days and Saturn will disappear in early March. Five of the planets will be easily visible to the unaided eye, but you’ll need a telescope to see Uranus and Neptune.

CONNECT THE DOTS

• While planetary conjunctions (the scientific name for “planetary parades”) themselves aren’t all that rare (they happen every few years or so), they get more unique with each planet that gets added to the chain, and seeing seven planets at once is a spectacular and unique event that won’t happen again until 2040. The three innermost planets in our solar system—Mercury, Venus, and Earth—align in the sky within 3.6 degrees of each other every 39.6 years. For all eight of the solar system’s planets to align that closely, it’d take 396 billion years, something that has not and will not ever happen, as our sun will become a red giant and consume the planets long before then (in about 5 billion years).