Look Up! A Rare Alignment of Planets Is Taking Place Right Now

From August 11th through 13th, if you go outside an hour before sunrise, six of the eight planets in the solar system will be above your horizon at the same time. Mercury, Jupiter, Mars, Uranus, Saturn, and Neptune spread in a long arc running from the eastern horizon across to the southwest. Four of them need nothing but your eyes, and the window is narrow. Jupiter is only just climbing out of the sun's glare after passing behind it. Mercury is already on its way back down and disappears around August 19th. For a little over a week, the two of them overlap, and that overlap is the only reason the count reaches six at all. But the number of planets is not the real story here. What happens between them is. In the middle of this window, two of these planets pass within a single moon-width of each other. The brightest planet in our entire night sky reaches the best position it will hold all year, with the crescent moon sliding right past it. And on the night of August 12th, all of it unfolds under a sky with no moon in it at all, while the strongest meteor shower of the year peaks overhead. Before we begin, make sure to subscribe to our channel so you never miss any cosmic update. Start looking about 60 minutes before your local sunrise. Face east and then let your eyes travel up and to the right. Highest and furthest along the arc, over towards the southwest, sits Saturn, in the constellation Pisces at magnitude 0.5. Magnitude is the brightest scale astronomers use, and it runs backwards, so the lower the number, the brighter the object, with the faintest things your eyes can detect sitting at about magnitude 6, the brightest stars around zero, and the brightest planets going negative. So Saturn at 0.5 is comfortably visible to the naked eye. It is the easiest target of the whole group because it has been up since around midnight and is well over the horizon by that time. Neptune is right beside it, but it is roughly 400 times too faint for the naked eye. You need a telescope, and even then, it shows only a tiny blue disc. Swing east from Saturn and you'll reach Uranus, currently in Taurus at magnitude 5.8, under a genuinely dark sky with no moon. That is technically within naked eye range, but almost nobody picks it out without help. Because at that brightness, it is indistinguishable from the faint background stars around it. Binoculars turn it into an obvious pale green point. Lower still is Mars, crossing from Taurus into Gemini, shining at magnitude 1.3. This is a weak year for Mars. It is a modest orange point, no brighter than an average star, and there is a specific reason for that, which we will come to. Then, low in the brightening east, Mercury and Jupiter. Mercury at around magnitude minus 1, Jupiter at minus 1.7, both close to the horizon and both racing the dawn. That last pair is where the difficulty lies. You need a flat, unobstructed eastern horizon. No trees, no buildings, no hills. If you get four of the six, that is a good morning's work. There is an obvious absence in that list. Venus, the brightest planet in the sky by a wide margin, is nowhere in the parade. That is because Venus has moved to the other end of the day. It is the evening star right now, and on August 14th to 16th, it reaches the greatest eastern elongation. Venus orbits closer to the Sun than we do, so from Earth, it can never appear far from the Sun in the sky. It is permanently tethered, swinging out to one side, back through the glare, out to the other side. Greatest elongation is the moment it reaches the far end of that swing, about 46 degrees from the Sun, which is as high and as long-lasting as Venus gets in the evening sky during this apparition. There is a detail worth catching with a telescope. Because Venus is at its greatest elongation, we are looking at it from the side, so it appears exactly half-lit, like the first quarter moon. Two pairings follow. On August 15th, a beautiful crescent moon sits about 4 degrees below Venus, low in the west, roughly 30-40 minutes after sunset. Then Venus spends the rest of the month closing in on Spica, the brightest star in Virgo. They meet on August 31st, when Venus passes 1.7 degrees from the star. The brightness gap between them is enormous, so it will look like a searchlight next to a candle. Now back to the morning sky and the tightest event of the month. On August 15th, Mercury and Jupiter pass half a degree apart in the constellation Cancer. That's slightly less than the width of the full moon. Hold your finger at arm's length against the sky, and it covers about 1 degree. These two planets will fit comfortably inside that. The timing is what makes it possible at all. Jupiter passed behind the Sun in July and has been invisible since. By August 15th, it is pulled far enough clear to rise a full hour before sunrise. Mercury, meanwhile, is heading the other way, falling back towards the Sun after its own greatest elongation. The two are moving in opposite directions, and they cross on the 15th. The night before, on August 14th, Mercury passes 0.6 degrees south of the Beehive Cluster, a loose swarm of around 1,000 stars about 600 light-years away. Be careful here. You are looking into the pre-dawn glow near the Sun. If you're using binoculars, be finished well before sunrise. The parade breaks up quickly. Mercury drops out around August 19th. Jupiter keeps climbing, by August 31st, stands 11 degrees high an hour before sunrise, and it will keep improving through the autumn. The next major event belongs to Saturn, which reaches opposition on October 4th. Opposition means Earth passes directly between a planet and the Sun, so the planet rises at sunset, sets at sunrise, and sits closest to us for the year. That is the best view of Saturn's rings you will get in 2026. Mars has to wait. This is an off year for it, which is why it looks so unremarkable in the parade. Its next opposition falls on February 19th, 2027. The Martian oppositions come only about every 26 months, because Earth has to catch up to a planet moving at a similar speed on a nearby orbit. Between now and then, Mars slowly brightens. Here's the part that makes August 12th unusual. The same new moon that lets you see all six planets in a dark sky does something else that night, and it will not happen again on this date until 2045. The perceived meteor shower reaches maximum on the night of August 12th into the 13th, and 2026 is an exceptional year for a simple reason. The new moon falls on August 12th, that is the same new moon that produces the total solar eclipse across Greenland, Iceland, and Spain earlier that day. Every August, Earth plows through a river of debris left behind by Swift-Tuttle, a comet that last came near the Sun in 1992. The grains it shed are mostly the size of sand. They hit our atmosphere and burn up around 60 miles overhead. That is what a Perseid is. Their theoretical peak rate is about 100 per hour, though that figure assumes a perfectly dark sky with a radiant directly overhead. Realistically, expect 50-70 an hour from a rural site and 15-25 from the suburbs. Even then, the Perseids offer a meteor at least every two minutes. Now, how to actually watch it? Because most people get this wrong and go home disappointed after 20 minutes. You need no equipment, none. A telescope is the worst possible tool here, and binoculars are barely better, because both of them narrow your field of view to a tiny patch of sky when the entire point is to cover as much sky as possible at once. Your unaided eyes are the correct instrument. Where you watch matters far more than what you bring. Meteor rates collapse under light pollution, and the difference between a city park and a genuinely dark countryside is not 20%. It is a factor of 4 or 5. Pull up a light pollution map before the night, find the nearest dark patch, and drive to it. An hour of travel will buy you more meteors than any amount of patience in a suburb. Avoid the direct glare of street lights, position yourself so buildings block any remaining local lights, and pick somewhere with an open view in as many directions as you can find. Then let your eyes adapt. Full dark adaptation takes 20-30 minutes, and one glance at a phone screen resets it. If you need light, use a red torch, or put red film over your phone, because red wavelengths largely spare your night vision. Do not stare at the radiant, this is the single most common mistake. Meteors near the radiant appear foreshortened as short stubs, because they are traveling almost directly towards you. The long dramatic streaks appear 40-60 degrees away from it, so find the radiant so you know where the meteors are coming from, then look well away from it, or simply look straight up. The radiant rises in the northeast during the evening and climbs through the night, so rates build steadily and peak in the last two hours before dawn, when Perseus is nearly overhead for mid-northern observers. One caveat on location, this is a northern hemisphere shower, from mid-northern latitudes, conditions are ideal. From the southern hemisphere, the radiant barely clears the horizon, so you'll see a fraction of the northern rates, and only in the hours before dawn. Which means one thing, stay out until dawn on August 13th, and you'll finish the meteor shower exactly as the six planets come up. So, thanks for watching! Tell us where you'll be watching from on the night of August 12th, and how much of the dark sky you actually get from there. And if you've ever stood inside Totality, tell us where and what those moments felt like, because most of us are still waiting. See you in the next video!