A Giant Planetary Alignment on January 25? Get the Facts About An Amazing Planet Display.

The 8 Planets 

First, here’s a quick review. Of the eight planets in our Solar System, there are five “bright planets” you can see with the naked eye (no gear) and only four planets that you can easily see without any problem. The fifth one, Mercury, is always near the Sun and never visible against a lovely dark sky, nor is it ever high up. 

• Half of the four brilliant planets—Venus and Jupiter—are always dazzling.
• Saturn is always bright but not eye-catching. 
• Mars varies its luminosity so much that it’s usually no more conspicuous than dozens of actual stars—nothing that would catch your eye.

Then there’s the realtor’s old, repetitious melody about “location, location, location.” If a planet is bright but doesn’t rise until 5 AM, how many will bother to set an alarm to take a look? Or if the planet is so low that trees and distant hills block it, it doesn’t make our must-see list, no matter how bright it gets.

An Amazing Planet Display in January

That’s why the present planet spectacle is so unusual. Of course, much of the talk on the web and even in print is getting it wrong. Many are calling it a “lineup of planets.” In actuality, two of them are on one side of the sky (lowish in the west) while the others hover in exactly the opposite direction in the east. Not remotely a line. But it doesn’t matter. You can handle this just fine; we’re here to make it easy.

The date and time are important. 

Start with Thursday. January 16 at 6:30 in the evening. If it’s cloudy, don’t worry; you’ll get several rain dates, which we’ll get to in a minute. 

1. Look toward the west, the direction in which the Sun set less than an hour ago. Wham—there’s a super-brilliant “star,” the brightest in the sky. That’s Venus. It’s so dazzling, you don’t even have to look for it. On its own, it’ll catch your eye, guaranteed.
    
2. At that date and time, a bright star stands just to the left of Venus. And by bright, that adjective means we’re comparing it with the night’s stars. Compared to Venus, it’s a nothingburger. This is Saturn. It’s 100 times less bright than Venus. 
   
   And though it’s still what astronomers call first magnitude, meaning in the top tier of luminosity, its current brilliance is less than usual because its rings are tilted almost exactly edgewise to us. Since those rings-of-ice are normally brighter than the cloudy body of the planet itself, and also because Saturn is now on the far side of the Sun and fully 16 times farther away from us than Venus, it’s about as dim as it can ever get.
   
   Yet, Saturn will still easily stand out to your naked eye. No need for a telescope or binoculars. Nor even any necessity to be in dark country skies. You’ll see it just fine from any city. The big draw is Venus and Saturn hovering so close together. But they’re not super low in the sunset direction. Happily, they’re not likely to be blocked by anything. If you check on them again an hour later, you’ll probably still see the planet duo easily, even though by 7:30, yes, now we’d have to say they’re legitimately low.
    
3. At that same start-up time of 6:30, swivel your head like that girl did in The Exorcist and face the east. A wonderland of bright stars greets you, and they’re all rising higher since, after all, this is what things do when they’re in the East. The highest up of these stars is also the brightest—Jupiter. It’s nearly as brilliant white as it can get and outshines every true star. So you won’t have any trouble identifying it. If you look to its right, the nearest bright star has an orange hue, and this is the famous Aldebaran, the main star of Taurus the Bull.
    
4. But we’re after planets, so look instead for another orange “star.” This one’s the lowest “star” in the east, and now you’ve found the final bright planet—Mars. Look closely above it, and you’ll see a bright (but not brilliant) true star, Pollux, who is the brighter of the Gemini twins. His brother Castor is a bit farther up and not quite as bright.
    
5. Swivel your head and take in all this brightness. In addition to Mars and Jupiter, this is the Orion area, the nearest place where new stars are being born, so there’s poetic beauty here, too. You’ll also see a single, blue-white star that matches the brightness of Mars and is the lowest of all these luminaries in the east. This is the famous Dog Star, Sirius, which happens to be one of the very closest stars, a mere 8.65 light-years away.

Now, let’s review the whole celestial spectacle. In the east, we see Jupiter highest up, outshining everything else. And orange Mars is fairly low, brighter than everything except Jupiter, and matching that lowest blue star, Sirius. Since their luminosities appear equal, you might enjoy looking from Mars to Sirius to see the obvious color contrast of orange and blue-white. Up high, Jupiter is simply white. So we have a red, white, and blue motif happening if you give yourself the liberty of considering Mars as  “The Red Planet,” which is its common nickname even though orange is not red any more than the hue of a pumpkin matches that of a stop sign.

Then, we finish our review by looking back to the West and enjoying this close encounter between Mars and Saturn. If it’s cloudy, everything in the east will look the same for many evenings to come. However, the Venus/Saturn conjunction will change during the next few nights. They’ll remain just as fine a spectacle as Venus moves upward from Saturn and slowly, by the 20th,  puts a little distance from Saturn, creating more of a gap between them.

That’s the whole story. It’s our best overall planet view in years and worth stepping out to see right before or after dinner. Even if it’s not a lineup.

See my Sky Watch report for all of January 2025.