Planetary parade: All planets on display Wednesday night
Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and the moon will be visible to the naked eye Wednesday night into Thursday while Uranus and Neptune require some help to see.
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A NASA spacecraft got closer to Jupiter and its moon than ever before and captured some images.
The solar system is giving a "grand tour" Wednesday night when all planets will be visible almost at the same time.
Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and the moon will be visible Wednesday night into Thursday. Most can be seen with the naked eye by looking to the southwest throughout the night. Mercury will be the smallest and hardest to see.
Meanwhile, the farthest planets, Uranus and Neptune, will require some visual aid to see. The planets should be visible with a telescope or some binoculars.
A clear sky is the only requirement to view the solar system – minus Earth – on display.
Wednesday night stargazing forecast for the U.S.
(FOX Weather)
If you are having trouble spotting all the planets, a sky-gazing app like Stellarium can help.
The Virtual Telescope Project shared a video of the planets during its "Grand Tour of the Solar System" event on Wednesday, taken from Rome.
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The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope completed its annual grand tour of the outer Solar System for 2021, including Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Note: The planets are not shown to scale in this image. (Image credit: NASA, ESA, A. Simon (Goddard Space Flight Center), and M.H. Wong (University of California, Berkeley) and the OPAL team)
"At the end of the year, the sky offers us the opportunity to see all the planets of our solar system at the very same time," according to the Virtual Telescope Project.
This summer, a similar planet grand tour happened when four naked-eye planets graced the morning sky, including Saturn, Mars, Jupiter, and Venus.