Sunday, July 18, 2010

All the other planets in our solar system nearly aligned perfectly this morning

I was out looking at the stars this morning and I noticed that currently (and for the next few weeks I guess) Jupiter is the brightest celestial object in the sky, after the moon and sun, of course. So, I came in and opened my favorite planetarium program, Stellarium, to see what else was out there, and I noticed that every planet in the solar system, plus the moon and sun were as close to perfect alignment as I've ever seen. Even some of the other objects in our solar system past Pluto were aligned (of course, Pluto was the planet farthest from alignment.) I took some screen shots:


In this image, you can see (from l to r): the Moon, Saturn, Mars, Vesta (one of those objects past Pluto), Venus, Mercury, the Sun, and Juno (another object past Pluto, quite a bit off, but in the picture). Click the image to make it larger. The planetary orbits are the red lines. I'm zoomed quite a bit out to see the big picture.



And in this image, (l to r) you can see the Sun, Jupiter and Uranus right together, Neptune, and then there's Pluto off kilter to the far right. Click the image to make it larger. In this image, I'm zoomed about the same distance but with a wider field of vision to fit the Sun in the same image with this grouping of planets.

Anyway, it was something which doesn't happen very often that I thought was cool and I wanted to share. Since they aren't perfectly aligned, I guess that's why nothing has really been written about this--that I have seen. But that's pretty dang close to perfect alignment, if you ask me!

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