Will there be a planetary alignment on January 25, 2025? Sort of, but it might not be as spectacular as some headlines suggest. While the planets won’t be lined up one after another in a perfect line, six of our solar system’s planets will be visible in the evening sky. Of these, only four will be bright enough for you to spot without any special equipment. The remaining two will be faint and require binoculars to see.
So why does it look like a line? Planets in our solar system orbit the sun in a relatively flat plane, and they tend to appear along a line in our sky, which astronomers call the ecliptic. This is the same path that the sun, moon, and planets follow as they move across the sky. This alignment is pretty typical, so while the planets will seem to form a line, they won’t be lined up one behind the other in a straight line stretching into space.
On January 25, 2025, you can expect to see four bright planets—Venus, Jupiter, Mars, and Saturn—across the evening sky. Two additional planets, Uranus and Neptune, will be present, but you’ll need binoculars to spot them, as they are faint and not easily visible to the naked eye. Mercury won’t be part of this evening show, as it will be too close to the sun, making it visible in the morning sky instead.
The idea of a “great planetary alignment” often circulates on social media, but it’s important to understand that the planets won’t be in a perfect alignment on one side of the sun. In fact, a perfect alignment of all eight planets in our solar system, with them all lined up on one side of the sun, is something that will never happen in our lifetimes—or even in the foreseeable future. According to astronomer Jean Meeus, the planets will never align within 3.6 degrees in a perfect line, with the next occurrence of such an event happening in about 396 billion years. So, while the planetary alignment in January 2025 will be beautiful, it won’t be the dramatic spectacle some are claiming.
