A very rare planetary alignment on Tuesday, Jan. 21 and Saturday, Jan. 25 is being promoted online. It's not specific to those dates, but six planets are now in the night sky, four of them visible to the naked eye.
If a planet is visible from the night side of Earth, it's always seen along an imaginary path through the sky called the ecliptic. This is the plane of the solar system. The ecliptic can easily understood if you picture a flat, round disk with the sun at the center, according to Sky & Telescope. All the planets, from Mercury out through Neptune, circle it in roughly the same plane. All of the planets, as well as the sun and moon, appear to travel along this path in the sky.
Currently rising in the east as the sun sets in the west is Mars, which on Jan. 12 reached "opposition" when Earth is precisely positioned between it and the sun. Now closer to Earth than at any time since late 2022 and until early 2027, the red planet -- visible below Jupiter -- looks a golden-reddish color to the naked eye.
On Jan. 13, the first full moon of the year, the "Wolf Moon," dramatically occulted Mars, moving across to hide the red planet for around an hour as seen from North America. Mars was about 266 times farther away than the moon.
The "planet parade" will continue through February, with a crescent moon joining on Friday, Jan. 31, when it will shine one degree from Saturn. The following evening, on Saturday, Feb. 1, a crescent moon will shine two degrees from bright Venus.
These spectacular sights will occur just days after the new moon on Wednesday, Jan. 29, which will signal the beginning of the Chinese Lunar New Year, the "Year of the Snake." Its timings are based on the traditional Chinese lunisolar calendar, which uses the moon's phases and the Earth's orbit around the sun, and will end with the rise of the full "Snow Moon" on Wednesday, Feb. 12.