A stunning photo has captured all seven of our neighboring planets in Earth’s sky at the same time, possibly for the first time ever.
The composite image, captured by astrophotographer Josh Dury, shows Mars, Jupiter, Uranus, Saturn, Venus, Neptune and Mercury in alignment thanks to a rare “planetary parade” taking place this weekend for the first time since 1982. (Here’s how you can see it for yourself tonight).
While spacecraft, such as NASA’s Voyager 1, have snapped all the planets in the sky from space, terrestrial cameras have only recently become advanced enough to capture them from the ground — meaning Dury’s photo is likely the very first of its kind.
“Seven (arguably, 8) is a feat that to my prior knowledge has not been achieved before,” Dury told Live Science in an email — suggesting that if we include Earth itself, visible in the foreground, the image’s planet total comes to eight. “This image could hold a record for being the first of its kind to photograph all the planets of the solar system, blended into a stitched panoramic image.”
Dury captured the image just after sundown on Feb. 22 from The Mendip Hills — a range of limestone hills in Somerset in the U.K.
Related: Have all 8 planets ever aligned?
To achieve this photographic feat, Dury created a composite shot made up of several panes, with each pane captured in multiple exposures.
To locate Saturn, Neptune and Mercury, which were dimmer and closer to the western horizon, Dury used astronomy software to generate models of the night sky and match planetary locations to nearby star fields. He then used a high dynamic range (HDR) camera setting to capture the planets’ faint light.
“I noted that when I took the image that it would not, of course, be possible to photograph the lowest planets at the moment of sunset — glare from the sun rendering this task impossible,” Dury said. “Therefore, this image is a record of the first possible glimpse of the planets as light from the sun diminished.” The night-sky models enabled him to later identify the planets in the image.
Planetary conjunctions occur when two or more planets appear to be close together in the sky. Of course, this is only from our perspective of the cosmos on Earth — in reality the planets remain extremely far apart.
These conjunctions aren’t rare, but they get rarer with each planet added to the chain. For example, the three innermost planets — Mercury, Venus and Earth — align within 3.6 degrees in the sky every 39.6 years. For all of the solar system’s eight planets to align as closely, it would take 396 billion years, something that has never happened and won’t happen before the sun becomes a red giant, consuming Mercury, Venus and likely Earth in the process.
However, it is a little less unusual for all seven planets to appear spread out on the same side of the sun, as they do in Dury’s image and in the night sky right now. Another seven-planet parade is expected to be visible from Earth in 2040.
If you’d like to see a planetary alignment for yourself, tonight (Feb. 28) is one of the best times to look. Time and Date and Stellarium are two great online tools for finding viewing times based on your location.
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