What’s Up: January 2025 Planet Parade and Comet ATLAS

“Cue the planet parade, Saturn and Venus cross paths, Mars expresses its opposition, and the outlook for the Quadrantid meteors.

In January, you’ll have the opportunity to take in four bright planets in a single, sweeping view.

All month after dark, you’ll find Venus and Saturn in the southwest for the first couple of hours, while Jupiter shines brightly high overhead, and Mars rises in the east. Uranus and Neptune are there too, technically, but they don’t appear as “bright planets.” These multi-planet viewing opportunities aren’t super rare, but they don’t happen every year, so it’s worth checking it out.

Now, these events are sometimes called “alignments” of the planets, and while it’s true that they will appear more or less along a line across the sky, that’s what planets always do. That line is called the ecliptic, and it represents the plane of the solar system in which the planets orbit around the Sun. This is, incidentally, why we sometimes observe planets appearing to approach closely to each other on the sky, as we view them along a line while they careen around the cosmic racetrack.”

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What’s Up: January 2025 Skywatching Tips from NASA

Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS Arrives from Afar

See January’s “Planet Parade,” plus Comet ATLAS Now Visible in Daylight

Rare comet may be visible for only time in 160,000 years