It's a sight that stargazers won't soon forget.
It was quite the show for stargazers.
In a rare occurrence, the planets of Mars, Jupiter, Venus, and even the moon lined up in the sky to provide an unmatched viewed for us here on Earth, and you didn’t even need a really good telescope to see it, according to a Tech Times report.
The show began on Friday, Nov. 6, and stretched into the weekend. People could see the planets with their naked eye, provided they had clear weather overhead.
Jupiter was the brightest, and could be seen a bit to the left of the crescent moon, with just three degrees of separation in the night sky.
By the time Saturday rolled around, the planets look to be all jumbled together in one part of the sky, and then the moon lined up with Venus, dimming Mars but creating an interesting phenomenon. Mars is fairly dim to begin with, at about 1/250th of the intensity of Venus.
While alignments like this between a couple of planets happen from time to time, it’s extremely rare for three planets and the moon to do so all at once.
In fact, this alignment has been in place for a while now, with NASA first writing about spotting it in late October as Venus, Jupiter, and Mars rose in the east to form a triangle.
“Every morning in late October, Venus, Jupiter, and Mars will rise in the east an hour or so before the sun. Together, they form a triangle in the pre-dawn sky. Venus and Jupiter are the brightest vertices–visible even after the black pre-dawn sky turns cobalt blue. Once you find them, you will have little trouble locating the dimmer Red Planet, which completes the triangle while the sky is still black,” NASA wrote on its site. “Although any morning in late October is a good time to look, the six day stretch from Oct. 24th through the 29th is the best. That’s because during this time, the triangle of planets will shrink until it is less than five degrees wide. For reference, the bowl of the Big Dipper is about 10 degrees wide so two of these triangles would fit comfortably inside the bowl.”
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