Rare planetary parade to light the sky Friday night – 69News WFMZ-TV
A mix of sun and clouds, breezy, and chillier for the final day of February. .
Turning mostly cloudy. Updated: February 28, 2025 @ 8:08 amReporterAn extraordinary celestial event is on the horizon for Friday night.You might have noticed some brighter than usual stars in the skies lately. They’re probably not stars, but planets.”Mars and Jupiter and Venus I think have been up together for a while,” said Stephanie Douglas, an Assistant Physics Professor at Lafayette College specializing in astronomy. On Friday a phenomenon known as a “planetary parade” will light up the sky.”The most obvious ones that you’ll be able to see are going to be Mars, Jupiter, Venus and Mercury, if you’re able to see it, just after sunset and then Uranus and Neptune are also up there too,” said Douglas.Douglas said you’ll need a telescope to see Uranus and Neptune. She said any basic telescope will help you get a nice view of the planets.”You don’t need a very powerful telescope to start seeing the moons of Jupiter or Saturn’s rings,” she said.Even without a telescope, you can see the planetary parade. Scientists say the best viewing time will be Friday after dusk.”It’ll look like really bright stars, so you want to look south, sort of, more overhead or high up in the sky to the south,” said Douglas.She said the planets will appear almost in a line, hence the “parade.””Getting one or two planets up in the sky is pretty common,” said Douglas. “Getting everything on the same side of the sun at once where you can see multiple of them, especially the ones close to the sun, that don’t get very far from sunrise and sunset is pretty unusual.”Reporter
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