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The term is also used to describe situations when all the planets are on the same side of the Sun although they are not necessarily in a straight line, such as on March 10, 1982. [8] Apparent planetary alignment involving Mercury, Venus, Mars, and Jupiter; the Moon is also shown, as the brightest object.
The next planetary alignment of five or more planets will be in late October 2028, and then again in February 2034. Another seven-planet alignment will not happen again until 2040. Show comments
All bodies in the Solar System attract one another. The force between two bodies is in direct proportion to the product of their masses and in inverse proportion to the square of the distance between them. As the planets have small masses compared to that of the Sun, the orbits conform approximately to Kepler's laws.
Draw a line between the two planets, then follow that line upwards to find Jupiter high overhead. Sky chart showing the planets visible to the naked eye after dark in January. NASA/JPL-Caltech
The orbit of every planet is an ellipse with the Sun at one of the foci. A line joining a planet and the Sun sweeps out equal areas during equal intervals of time. The squares of the orbital periods of planets are directly proportional to the cubes of the semi-major axis of the orbits.
In celestial mechanics, a Kepler orbit (or Keplerian orbit, named after the German astronomer Johannes Kepler) is the motion of one body relative to another, as an ellipse, parabola, or hyperbola, which forms a two-dimensional orbital plane in three-dimensional space. A Kepler orbit can also form a straight line.
The last time all eight planets were aligned was on Dec. 28, 2022. On Jan. 18, 2025, there will be six planets in the alignment: Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, Uranus, Neptune and Saturn.
Earth's terminator as seen from space. A terminator or twilight zone is a moving line that divides the daylit side and the dark night side of a planetary body.The terminator is defined as the locus of points on a planet or moon where the line through the center of its parent star is tangent.