Astrophotographer Andrew McCarthy published a colorful collage on social networks. It shows the recent “parade of planets” widely publicized by the media.
In January 2025, conditions in the sky made it possible to observe six planets in the Solar System at the same time: Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune (of course, only the first four of them could be seen with the naked eye).
Covering this event, many media outlets, for some reason, emphasized January 21 as the day when all the planets would line up in an arc in the sky, which honestly made little sense. Since the orbits of the planets pass close to the ecliptic plane, they are always along an arc in the Earth’s sky. And the date of January 21 was not unique, since the position of the six planets in the sky didn’t differ much from the neighboring days.
But in any case, even if the descriptions of the event were not particularly accurate, they prompted many people to look up at the sky and admire the planets. Astrophotographer Andrew McCarthy decided to show what they would look like if they were in the same small sector of the sky, lined up in a geometrically aligned line. He photographed each of the six planets with a telescope, then made a collage respecting scales showing their apparent sizes in the sky in relation to each other and to the Moon.
When viewed diagonally from top to bottom, the photo shows Saturn, Venus, Neptune, Uranus, Jupiter, Mars, and the Moon. For comparison, McCarthy also added comet C/2024 G3 (ATLAS), which graced the Southern Hemisphere in January, to the image.
