All of them find themselves on the morning side of the Sun.
See the end note about enlarging illustrations. Arrows through the moving bodies show their movement (against the starry background) from 2 days earlier to 2 days later. Moon and Sun are exaggerated 2 times in size. Venus is exaggerated 150 times in size, to show its crescent shape. Saturn is exaggerated 150 times in size, to show the current attitude of its rings.
They are, east to west: Venus, Jupiter, Mercury, Uranus, Mars, Neptune, Saturn. And then, for good measure, dwarf planet Pluto. By the numbers: 2 5 1 7 4 8 6 9.
And the waning crescent of the Moon comes crusing down past them all.
It’s not a “line-up,” like those that have occasionally caused fear of tidal effects; not a Grand Curve (5 6 7 8) like that which made possible the Grand Tour of the Voyagers.
Nor are they all in the sky, in the sense of being high enough before sunrise to be observed. Jupiter was at conjunction behind the Sun on May 18, Venus will be on June 4, and Mercury on June 14.
In this view from 15° north of the ecliptic plane, and from ecliptic longitude 253°, the paths of the planets are shown in June, and sightlines from Earth to the Sun and planets on Jun 3. The Sun is exaggerated 4 times in size, the four inner planets 300 times, the giant outer planets (mostly out of the picture) 50 times. The dashed line is toward the vernal equinox direction, the zero point for mapping positions in the sky.
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This weblog maintains its right to be about astronomy or anything under the sun.
ILLUSTRATIONS in these posts are made with precision but have to be inserted in another format. You may be able to enlarge them on your monitor.
One way: right-click, and choose ”View image” or ”Open image in new tab”, then enlarge. Or choose ”Copy image”, then put it on your desktop, then open it. On an iPad or phone, use the finger gesture that enlarges (spreading with two fingers, or tapping and dragging with three fingers). Other methods have been suggested, such as dragging the image to the desktop and opening it in other ways.
Sometimes I make improvements or corrections to a post after publishing it. If you click on the title, rather than on ‘Read more’, I think you are sure to see the latest version. Or, if you click ‘Refresh’ or press function key 5, you’ll see the latest version.
Did you ever find your program? If it was easy (with the program) I’d be interested in knowing how often the planets are lined up in order and all in the “sky” at the same time. 1-2-4-5-6-7-8-(9)
Will get back to this sometime.
You left Mars out of the text, but not the illustrations.
Acquaintances who get their skywatching advice from social media have been asking me how to observe the upcoming “once in a lifetime” (again?) line-up of all the planets on June 4. I’ve told them to look for Saturn, Mars, and the Moon, and to imagine the others. I did see Neptune through binoculars yesterday morning, for the first time during his current apparition. But I needed to use a chart and careful star-hopping. The Moon and Saturn were lovely, and easy, this morning.
I already noticed that I omitted poor Mars, and restored him.
The science columnist in The Guardian calls this an “alignment”. The planets are in a line only in the sense that they are all on or near the ecliptic, which they always area.
I think I wrote and showed a program for finding spans of time when the planets are all on one side of the sun, but I can’t find it because I can’t remember what I called it.