The planets are literally aligning tonight as all 7 planets in our solar system will be visible at once.
According to Michelle Cash, Program Specialist at Sandy Creek Nature Center and leader of the local Athens astronomy club, you’ll be able to see most of them with the naked eye, “Up there, you can see Mars, it’ll be this lovely red dot up in the sky. And then you’ll be able to see Jupiter really, really bright. Venus, of course, will be one of the brightest objects in the sky. Then you’ll see Mercury and Saturn too, so it’s really exciting and it’s fun! Uranus and Neptune are gonna be up there too but you can’t see those with your eyes, you’d have to have a telescope to be able see those.”
She says the best time to go look is just after sunset, "Right at 6:46, like at 6:45 to about 7:30ish, that’s a good time to to be able to see it. Anything that can get people outside excited about the night sky, I’m all for it! So if you’ve never seen it before, I’d highly recommend going outside and looking up.”
If, after tonight, you want to learn more, Michelle says there’s plenty of opportunity to do just that at the Nature Center, “If anyone is ever interested in learning more about astronomy, the planets, the stars...things like that - here at the nature center we have a planetarium, a lot of people don’t realize that. Everybody can come to it. We have family planetariums once a month and the astronomy club meets once a month as well. Sometimes we go out to Sandy Creek Park and have star watches!”
