A parade of 5 planets in the morning sky

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Inner Planets feed


All five of the planets that are visible to the unaided eye planets will be above the horizon at the same time, shortly before sunrise.

It is relatively rare for all of the planets to be aligned in one hemisphere so as to all be above the horizon at the same moment. Such an alignment between the five planets which are visible to the unaided eye happens roughly once every 6 years, while an alignment that also includes Uranus and Neptune, which require binoculars or a telescope to be seen, happens around once every 70 years.

However, since the planets in the outer solar system – especially Saturn, Uranus and Neptune – move quite slowly through the constellations, such alignments can occur multiple times in quick succession, or not at all for over 100 years.

The positions of all the planets at sunrise will be as follows:

Planet Altitude
at sunrise
Direction
at sunrise
Planet
rises at
Mag Constellation
Mercury 16.1° east 04:32 -0.2 Cancer
Venus 38.0° east 02:32 -4.2 Gemini
Jupiter 47.3° east 01:40 -2.0 Gemini
Mars 61.9° south 22:40 -0.7 Aries
Saturn 28.2° south-west 20:51 0.6 Pisces

Celestial coordinates

The positions of each of the planets will be:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
Venus 06h24m 20°49'N Gemini -4.2 19"4
Jupiter 06h23m 23°03'N Gemini -2.0 33"3
Mars 02h51m 13°39'N Aries -0.7 12"6
Mercury 08h52m 16°51'N Cancer -0.2 7"3
Saturn 00h11m 1°28'S Pisces 0.6 19"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0.

Next/previous occurrences

« Previous Objects simultaneously visible Next »
21 Dec 2022 All seven planets 07 Jan 2123
10 Jan 2081 All five planets that are
visible to the unaided eye
22 Jun 2098

The sky on 5 May 2024

The sky on 5 May 2024
Sunrise
05:43
Sunset
19:54
Twilight ends
21:43
Twilight begins
03:54


Waning Crescent

6%

27 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:53 11:13 17:34
Venus 05:28 12:18 19:07
Moon 04:16 10:36 17:10
Mars 04:08 10:12 16:16
Jupiter 06:17 13:27 20:37
Saturn 03:32 09:11 14:50
All times shown in EDT.

Warning

Never attempt to point a pair of binoculars or a telescope at an object close to the Sun. Doing so may result in immediate and permanent blindness.

Source

The circumstances of this event were computed using the DE430 planetary ephemeris published by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

This event was automatically generated by searching the ephemeris for planetary alignments which are of interest to amateur astronomers, and the text above was generated based on an estimate of your location.

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Image credit

The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.

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