• Optional@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    An extremely rare planetary alignment will take place on February 28, 2025. Don’t miss it — an event like this won’t happen again this decade!

    In the evening, just after sunset, seven planets — Saturn, Mercury, Neptune, Venus, Uranus, Jupiter, and Mars — will align in the sky. Four of them (Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, and Mars) will be easily visible to the naked eye. For Uranus and Neptune, get a pair of binoculars or a small telescope. Saturn will be the most difficult target to see — you’ll need to know the exact time for your exact location as the planet hangs close to the Sun.

    • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 month ago

      i hate when people use vague blocks of time to refer to something that we know with 100% certainty.

      “YOU WILL NOT BE AWAKE SOMEWHERE WITH THE PERIOD OF APPROXIMATELY 12 HOURS FROM NOW, DO NOT MISS YOUR CHANCE TO DO SOMETHING TODAY”

      are we talking like, once every decade, once every two decades, once a century? I gotta have a reference frame here.

    • Asafum@feddit.nl
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      1 month ago

      I’m not so sure about the binoculars part there… I have an 8" dobsonian telescope and I have a hard time finding those two.

    • psud@aussie.zone
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      1 month ago

      I saw Saturn from a suburban street a week or two ago just after sunset, near the moon and Venus, and it was visible, though my elderly mother in law couldn’t see it

    • ladicius@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      I was gonna say.

      Nearly everything one observes year round is Earth. Even your clothes and the cloud of your warm breath when you are out observing the alignment in the cold is Earth.

    • Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de
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      1 month ago

      you’re talking about the order from the sun, but that’s not necessarily how it has to appear in our sky. It’s like how the stars in orion’s belt are actually stupidly far from each other, and from their perspective they have absolutely nothing to do with each other.

  • Wren@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    Years ago, I think I remember seeing a screenshot- could have been from Quora, where someone was asking why we haven’t sent astronauts to the sun.

    I lost a pretty big chunk of my faith in humanity that day.

  • conditional_soup@lemm.ee
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    1 month ago

    I lead stargazing classes with my city parks, and I can tell you that it’s pretty much impossible to find earth in the night sky.

      • conditional_soup@lemm.ee
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        1 month ago

        Idk, bro, I’ve never seen Earth at the horizon, it’s mostly just trees and houses and stuff. Do you have to be in dark skies?

      • NigelFrobisher@aussie.zone
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        1 month ago

        How is that an alignment though? It’s not like MacGuyver or Lara Croft is going to have to stop some baddies from assembling ancient artefacts in a particular room to unleash arcane terrors into the world just because the planets are sort-of visible together in the sky.

        • my_hat_stinks@programming.dev
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          1 month ago

          It’s an alignment because if you look up at it they’re in a line. That’s what alignment means, Lara Croft and ancient artifacts are optional.

        • psud@aussie.zone
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          1 month ago

          They’re in orbits at different distances from the sun and so take different times to complete an orbit. Also we’re closer to the sun than most, so circling faster, and further than Venus and Mercury so circling slower, so sometimes some planets appear to be going the wrong way along the ecliptic

          Some planets are in resonance with others (for example orbiting 3 times for the other’s 4)

          So sometimes other planets are on the other side of the sun, sometimes they’re on this side of the sun but the opposite side of the sky