Hacker Remix

A rare alignment of 7 planets is about to take place

201 points by koolba 2 weeks ago | 83 comments

mcdeltat 2 weeks ago

Apparently this is visible everywhere on Earth, which is cool. (Sometimes sites don't bother saying where and it turns out to only be visible in the US - very annoying for those who live elsewhere.)

https://starwalk.space/en/news/what-is-planet-parade

wkat4242 2 weeks ago

Makes sense because the planets are so far away that a different viewpoint on earth won't make a noticeable difference. Unlike for the moon. This is why lunar eclipses are the ones that are only visible in certain places.

niwtsol 1 week ago

I don't think it is simply the "planets are so far away" that allows this to be visible from everywhere on earth. Stars are very far away compared to planets, and that distance makes them only visible from certain hemispheres (certain stars are only visible from certain hemispheres). I believe the fact that the planets are all on the ecliptic is what makes the alignments visible worldwide.

dylan604 1 week ago

The large/small Magellanic Clouds are further away than the planets and yet are only visible in the souther hemisphere. The difference here is that the planets are all on the same ecliptic path.

mannykannot 1 week ago

Plus that they are near the ecliptic - comets may only be visible from one hemisphere (often plus some, but not all, of the other), even though naked-eye visible comets are typically further away than Venus.

You will not see this alignment if you are at the south pole or other points sufficiently south of the antarctic circle, either, given the time of year.

BurningFrog 1 week ago

Lunar eclipses only last a few hours, so only the half of Earth facing the moon at the time can see them.

jmclnx 1 week ago

Oh Noooos, the world will end :)

I remember all the dooms day articles the last time, then I think all 8 aligned. That is what Voyagers used to get to the outer planets quickly and were they are now.

This time, I saw nothing about "world ending". I guess they moved on to other things. Too bad NASA was not funded enough to use this to launch a more advanced spacecraft :(

RangerScience 1 week ago

> Oh Noooos, the world will end :)

reads this from Southern Californa

Legit.

bee_rider 1 week ago

It isn’t as fun to speculate about fanciful and silly world ending mechanisms like planetary alignment, when we’re actually locking in a bunch of ecologically devastation by boring processes like… status quo bias and failures to coordinate.

It’d be cool as hell if we were destroyed by some grand universal conspiracy. Instead, we’re doomed by the same force that makes the office lunch group unable to gather consensus around anything other than cheese pizza.

bovermyer 1 week ago

Cheese pizza can go directly to Hell.

bee_rider 1 week ago

I’m not opposed to cheese pizza in principle but if it should also be possible to pick some toppings!

pizza 1 week ago

Out of the frying pan, into the fire, as they say - but with pizza ovens and damnation

timbit42 1 week ago

No, it is the beginning of another cycle.

hulitu 6 days ago

Oh no, not another period.

sys_64738 1 week ago

It never ends well in the movies.

ls65536 1 week ago

There's also a lunar occultation of Mars (which is near opposition itself, making it relatively bright) happening in a few days, and then again in February, which should be visible from parts of the northern hemisphere: https://in-the-sky.org/news.php?id=20250114_16_100

imglorp 1 week ago

Is there anything special to learn about occultations like this or are they just curiosities like alignments?

zh3 1 week ago

By precisely timing them you can measure/check various facts like distance, diameter and so on. In fact, if you time them precisely from different locations on earth you can determine the shape of the occulting body (e.g. an asteroid occulting a star). And on occasion you can get a 'grazing occultation', for example a star goes behind mountains on the moon resulting in it blinking on and off; observe from multiple latitudes and it's possible to recover the profile of the range.

bongoman42 1 week ago

Occultations can tell you about the atmosphere of the object in front. Depending on the rate at which the background object fades can tell you about atmospheric density, composition etc. If it disappears suddenly it indicates there may be no atmosphere.

dylan604 1 week ago

Saturn is also playing peekaboo with the moon as well

serial_dev 2 weeks ago

This sounds quite interesting. I’m considering buying a telescope for this occasion (we moved out of the city and I’ve been thinking about it for a while, the sky is always so clear around very).

What would you recommend as entry level beginner telescope? Is it worth observing all this via a telescope?

deodar 2 weeks ago

A good pair of binoculars will be sufficient. You didn't need a ton of light gathering capability for casual planet viewing like this.

Telescopes are a bit of a rabbit hole. Many cheap mass market telescopes are also known as hobby killers. A 6" dobsonian (reflector) is a good starting point for deep space objects like nebulae and star clusters. For planetary viewing Schmidt-Cassegrain telescopes are great.

However, learning to use a telescope requires time and patience. Taking it to the field for an event like this for the first time may be frustrating as you will be spending most of the time figuring out how to collimate and align it.

I certainly don't mean to discourage you from getting one though.

A good pair of binoculars is much easier to use. They require no collimation out of the box and show an upright image that makes it much easier to navigate the sky, at the cost of reduced magnification and light gathering capability. You will be surprised how many celestial objects even 10x magnification reveals that are invisible to the naked eye.

Happy planet gazing!

ryandrake 1 week ago

My brother started at "I'll just buy one telescope" and last I checked has just finished constructing a powered observatory on some remote land where the telescope and rooftop motors can be operated entirely remotely through cell connectivity. This is a worse hobby for your wallet than having a boat.

Loughla 1 week ago

That's a hilarious escalation.

dylan604 1 week ago

That’s pretty normal tack. It’s just most people can’t get there vs not wanting to. A not insignificant amount of money is required to get to that point. It costs nothing to have the desire though

madphilosopher 1 week ago

Someone else did this, then built 20 more next to it. Now it's a business where they sell telescope time to researchers and hobbyists. I imagine it's profitable for them.

dylan604 1 week ago

Binoculars are a bit misleading though as most people tire of trying to keep hold of them and track steadily. If you’re going to the level of getting some sort of mount/tripod for the binocs, you might as well step up to a telescope with GoTo features with tracking.

minnowguy 7 days ago

There are devices that allow you to connect your binoculars to standard camera tripods.

tzs 1 week ago

Where does one buy good telescopes nowadays?

For most of the last 50 years I would have said order from Orion Telescopes, but they abruptly disappeared last July.

blueelephanttea 1 week ago

High Point Scientific is a great option. They sell tons of options and have great service.

For example, this is an extremely commonly recommended for serious beginners that is sold by them: https://www.highpointscientific.com/apertura-ad8-8-inch-dobs...

elevatedastalt 2 weeks ago

No a telescope won't help. The 'linear' alignment spans the whole sky and is best seen with the naked eye.

You can click a pic with a wide-angle lens (whether on your phone or a camera).

jfim 1 week ago

Will a picture from a wide angle lens actually show the planets? I thought planets just show up as a bright dot in the sky.

kadoban 1 week ago

> Will a picture from a wide angle lens actually show the planets?

Yes.

> I thought planets just show up as a bright dot in the sky.

Correct. :)

There's no real way to get around that geometry problem, you can either see several at once but they're pinpricks or one at a time but potentially somewhat more clearly.

1000100_1000101 1 week ago

To add to this, I'll try to give an idea of how much zoom (or focal length really) you'd need to get a picture with detail.

I took photos of both Jupiter and Saturn w/ a Canon R7 and the RF 100-500mm lens, with a 1.4x extender. The 1.4x extender make the lens act like 700mm instead of 500mm. The R7 being an APS-C sensor adds another 1.6x factor, making the combo the equivalent of 1120mm. In these photos the planets are still just dots. The camera takes 32.5 megapixel photos. When zoomed in to the pixel level, both planets were still tiny, about 50 pixels wide. It was enough to see Saturn had a ring and some color striping on Jupiter, but that's it.

The iPhone main camera is like 26mm (42x less zoom). The iPhone 13 Pro's telephoto lens is 77mm (14.5x less zoom), and the iPhone 15 Pro Max is 120mm (9.3x less zoom)... so you're unlikely to get much more than what looks like an out of focus few pixel wide dot even on the zoomiest of iPhones, but with that wider 26mm lens, you just might be able to capture them all in one shot.

To me, what's more technically impressive than the fact I took pictures of the planets with readily available camera gear was that I did with 1/125s shutter speed, handheld, standing in my yard. The accuracy of the image stabilization needed to pull that off is what astounded me the most.

dylan604 1 week ago

Yes, but they will show exactly as you thought with the exception Mars will be a noticeable red dot. Uranus is usually too dim to see though. Usually to photograph Uranus and Pluto requires multiple nights worth of images to align and see which dot moves between the images. That moving dot is the planet

ahazred8ta 1 week ago

A $200 6 inch / 150mm reflector with the eyepiece on the side is a decent backyard starter scope. You can see the moons of Jupiter, Saturn's rings, the crescent shape of Venus, and nebulas. Ask your local library about the local astronomy club. Someone may have a >200mm scope.

tzs 1 week ago

I agree with the other recommendation to go with binoculars for your first foray into assisted sky viewing.

Another point in favor of binoculars for people living out of the city is that places out of the city often have more wildlife. Binoculars can be great for observing that.

When choosing binoculars there are a couple tradeoffs. Binoculars are listed as M x D, where M is the magnification and D is the diameter of the lenses in mm. For M here are some considerations:

• Bigger M makes things look bigger.

• Bigger M also reduces the field of view.

• The smaller the field of view the steadier you will need to be able to hold the binoculars to keep something in the field of view. A magnification of 15 for example would probably be useless for most people who are not using a tripod and trying to keep a flying bird in view. Actually it would probably even by hard with a tripod. But for looking at something that isn't moving (or whose apparent motion is very slow like a planet) 15 might work by hand and would be a piece of cake with a tripod.

For D some considerations are:

• The bigger the D the more light the lenses gather, letting you see dimmer objects.

• The bigger the D the more the binoculars weigh which makes it harder to keep them steady without a tripod and tires you out faster.

Another thing you might want to consider is the "close focus distance". Binoculars can focus on things from the close focus distance to infinity. For binoculars meant for astronomy the close focal distance can be 50 feet or more. Not a problem when you are looking at the Moon, but might be if you want to take a look at a squirrel frolicking in your yard.

Binoculars meant for wildlife will have a much shorts close focal distance. For example I've got Celestron's Nature DX 8x42 binoculars [1] and their close focus distance is 6.5 feet.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Celestron-71332-Nature-Binocular-Gree...