February 28: Six Worlds in a Single Sky

Tonight, six planets of our solar system gather along the same arc of sky — a rare celestial alignment that won't repeat in this form until 2034.

Step outside tonight about thirty minutes after sunset, face west, and look up. Stretching in a gentle arc from the horizon to the southern sky, six of the eight planets of our solar system will be visible at once — Mercury, Venus, Saturn, Neptune, Uranus, and Jupiter arrayed along the ecliptic like lanterns hung on an invisible wire. It is one of the most accessible and visually stunning astronomical events of the decade, highlighted by NASA as a marquee skywatching moment of 2026, and it is happening tonight.

A Parade Four Billion Years in the Making

The phenomenon has a deceptively simple explanation rooted in the ancient geometry of our solar system. All eight planets orbit the Sun along nearly the same flat plane — a remnant of the spinning disk of gas and dust from which they coalesced some 4.6 billion years ago. Seen from Earth, that shared orbital plane traces a curved path across the sky called the ecliptic, and on certain evenings, the planets pile up along it like beads on a string. Tonight is one of those evenings. Low in the west at dusk, Mercury and the dazzling beacon of Venus cluster close together near the horizon, joined by Saturn — faintly golden and steady — and the impossibly distant Neptune nearby, requiring binoculars to detect. Higher in the darkening sky, blue-green Uranus hangs beneath the Pleiades in Taurus, and above it all, unmistakable Jupiter blazes from the south near the twin stars of Gemini, the brightest object in the night sky after the Moon, which itself joins the procession tonight in a near-full phase near Jupiter.

Six-planet evening alignments are genuinely uncommon. According to astronomers at San Diego State University, the next time this many planets will all be above the horizon simultaneously during nighttime hours won't occur until 2034. What makes tonight's display particularly special is its accessibility: four of the six worlds — Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, and Mercury — are visible to the naked eye under clear skies. No specialized equipment, no remote dark-sky location required. For the price of stepping outside and knowing where to look, any person on Earth with a clear western horizon can witness the majority of our solar system arranged in a single sweeping view — the same planets that ancient astronomers tracked across millennia, the same worlds that Copernicus and Galileo argued about, the same neighbors our robotic emissaries have visited and photographed and mapped.

Six planets arc across the twilight sky in a rare planetary parade

Six planets trace the arc of the ecliptic across tonight's western sky — a planetary parade shaped by the same primordial disk of gas and dust that formed our solar system 4.6 billion years ago.

The viewing window is short — the inner planets, Mercury and Venus, will follow the Sun below the western horizon within an hour of sunset — so timing matters. Begin looking about thirty minutes after your local sunset, starting low in the west and sweeping upward toward the south to find Jupiter. Binoculars will reveal Uranus as a faint blue-green disk and help tease Neptune from the twilight glow near Saturn. A stargazing app can serve as a guide. But even without one, the scale of what you are seeing is worth pausing to consider: in a single unobstructed glance, you can take in worlds ranging from 48 million miles away to nearly 2.8 billion miles distant, all of them moving, all of them neighbors, all of them momentarily gathered in the same corner of our sky on a winter evening in 2026.