A six-planet show in the sky – Mars glows red

Four of the six planets can be seen with the naked eye. Mars stands out as brighter than usual, and its reddish hue is easy to spot.

January offers a great opportunity to admire the glitter of the planets at a glance.

Six of the planets in the Solar System – Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune – are currently visible at the same time in the night sky.

The first four can be seen with the naked eye, while Uranus and Neptune require a telescope to be seen.

The phenomenon has been jokingly called a \”parade of planets\” in the media, but it is not an official astronomical term.

You can see the red of Mars

Three of the planets, Venus, Jupiter and Mars, can be seen quite brightly in the sky, writes the astronomical association Ursa in its blog. Saturn appears dimmer than others.

According to Ursa, Mars is currently brighter than usual, and its reddish hue can easily be seen with the naked eye throughout the night.

Saturn and Venus appear close together in the sky, and they are accompanied by Neptune in the same group. The Moon joins the cluster on the first day of February when it transits between Saturn and Venus.

There’s a lot of hype on Soma

There have been claims circulating on social media that the \”parade of planets\” only happens once every 396 billion years. This is not true.

The solar system is only a little over 4.5 billion years old. The entire universe began about 13 billion years ago.

In fact, such celestial collections of planets are not at all rare, but not every year either, says the US space agency Nasa. According to Ursa, a similar phenomenon recurs at least every 2–3 years.

Another claim circulating is that all the planets in the solar system would now be in a straight line in the sky. This is also only partly true, because Mercury is not visible at all at the moment.

The planets visible now are not in a completely straight line either, but through them you can make out a clear arc across the sky. Ursa and Nasa point out that this is always the case when the planets appear in the sky at the same time.

This is due to the fact that the planets already orbit the Sun in roughly the same plane.

The planets are also visible on different sides of the sky. Mars rises from the east at the same time when Venus and Saturn are already setting with the Sun towards the west. Jupiter, on the other hand, shines high in the middle between Mars and Venus.

You can search for planets in the sky, for example, with Ursa’s Star Map application. From the pictures on Ursa’s blog, you can see how the planets are positioned in the sky.