A planetary party portrait above Paranal

In this portrait of ESO’s Paranal Observatory, taken in early February, our planets appear to parade one after the other across the night sky. In addition to the Moon, our own Milky Way, and the comet C/2024 G3, we can see Saturn, Venus, Jupiter and Mars — even Neptune and Uranus are hiding here too!

Often on nights with a few planets in view, you can draw an imaginary straight line in the night sky through them. This is due to their orbital paths being relatively aligned along a single, flat plane called the ecliptic. (In reality, the planets aren’t aligned one after the other in a straight line in the Solar System, they are fanned out; but we can still see them simultaneously in the sky, which only happens every few years.)

You may notice that in this image the planets are not contained within the band of the Milky Way, and that the line that connects them crosses the Milky Way at an angle. This is due to the ecliptic being tilted at about 60 degrees to the galactic plane on which our entire Milky Way lies. If the Milky Way could somehow be shrunk down to lie flat on a table, our Solar System would be jutting out like a pin stuck in it at an odd angle.

Links

• Fisheye projection (unlabeled)
• Equirectangular projection (labeled)
• Equirectangular projection (unlabeled)