By Ian Shapira
The Washington Post
Jupiter and Saturn have finally lumbered around. Those lazy bodies of rock and gas, it takes them forever to orbit. They have finally rendezvoused with the rest of the party — Mars, Venus and Mercury — and now all five planets visible with the naked eye can be seen on the western horizon.
They’re line-dancing, mingling and conjuncting in a diagonal slash across the sky that earthlings have not seen since 1940 and will not see again until 2040. While this arrangement happens every 20 years or so, it sometimes appears during daytime, making it harder to see, and it is rarely as vivid.
The planetary phenomenon happens to coincide with National Sky Awareness Week, as hundreds of professionals and amateurs around the world haul out telescopes and trek to parks and open spaces to take a peek at the luminous confluence.
The show lasts through May. The best viewing time is twilight, when the sun has dipped below the horizon enough that it does not overwhelm the glow of planets but still illuminates their hues of blue, yellow and orange.
"This will be something that spawns a new crop of astronomers. It’s like when astronomers say, ‘Oh yeah, it was that beautiful moon and Venus conjunction back in October ‘82, I’ll always remember it.’ Or, it might have been the comet Haley or the comet Hale-Bopp. Well, there will be people who will always remember this," said Alan MacRobert, a senior editor at Boston-based Sky &Telescope magazine.
The magazine’s Web site, skyandtelescope.com, shows where to look in the sky to see the planetary alignment.
Some die-hard astronomers, however, contend that the lineup is unusual but no big deal, scientifically.
"There’s nothing you can learn by looking at it," said Bob Bolster, a founder of the Hopewell Observatory in the Bull Run Mountains near Haymarket, Va. "It’s not going to produce any data. It’s not really a big deal for the serious people."
Still, some observers are riveted by the lineup’s peculiarities, especially Mercury, the closest planet to the sun.
"Mercury is always a trickster. It’s always a personal triumph if you get a peek at it because it sits so low on the horizon," said John Avellone, a Northern Virginia Astronomy Club trustee. "But when you look at the whole thing, you just say, ‘Gee, these are the gears of the clock — the sky clock.’ "
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