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Those who look up on these nights under a cloudless sky can see something special. All planets in our solar system are visible, or at least: they all pass once during the night. They were closest to each other around 10pm last night but are still in sight for the next few days.
The planets are not all visible to the naked eye. Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn yes, but Uranus and Neptune are so far away that you usually need at least binoculars to see them. And Mercury is also complicated; it can only be found just after sunset above the southwestern horizon.
The big planet show isn’t very special, however. It happens on average every one or two years that the whole family shows up in one night. As of June, five planets were still visible at once.
“There are always planets to see,” explains astronomer and science journalist Carl Koppeschaar. “Sometimes you have beautiful conjunctions with the moon, or between two or three planets. I can warm up. But such an ‘everything is now visible!’ It doesn’t sound like serious astronomy to me. It would be really special if there were no planets to see.”
“But still,” she adds, “if people can be warmed by that fact to look up, that’s a nice plus.”
And this is happening more and more. Because you no longer have to build a complete observatory in the attic to take beautiful pictures of a planet, for example. Telescopes still aren’t cheap, but they’re more compact and better than they were a few years ago, says Esther Hanko, an amateur astronomer involved with the University of Amsterdam’s Anton Pannekoek Institute for Astronomy. “For a few hundred euros you already have good binoculars.”
Some amateur astronomers even share their best photos of the entire year around this time, because some planets were much better visible a few months ago:
To photograph even what you see with binoculars you need something more. A special astronomical camera, for example (and in recent years they have become more affordable), and also software for selecting the sharpest images. And there is also navigation by which the telescope itself searches for a certain celestial body. But none of that is necessary just for looking at planets, says Hanko, who has one blog written on. “Even with normal binoculars you can see some of the moons around Jupiter, and in August you saw the rings around Saturn as well.”
Self has already made beautiful images of Mars, Jupiter and Saturn in recent months. There are amateur astronomers who go on marathons to find with their binoculars as many special objects as possible in one night, but that doesn’t happen because of something like the coincidence that the entire family of planets is visible. “This is especially for people who want an introduction to stargazing,” says Hanko. “But it’s also fun for advanced users to capture them all in one evening and then share the photos.”
