5 planets visible before dawn in rare sky parade

Wake up before dawn to watch a planetary parade.

Five planets — Mercury, Venus, Mars, Saturn and Jupiter — are visible in a rare celestial spectacle until late next month.

It’s the first time in more than a decade that all five are simultaneously visible to the naked eye.

“At this point, Mercury is still pretty faint,” said Mike Shanahan, the Bishop Museum’s director of education, exhibits and planetarium. “It’s still going to be pretty hard to see it.”

Shanahan said Mercury won’t be much different than a star in brightness until closer to the end of the month.

Astronomers put optimal viewing at 45 minutes before sunrise, which Monday will be at 7:10 a.m. Any earlier, Mercury will be low on the horizon. A waning gibbous moon also will join the parade this week.

The show is expected to run until Feb. 20, but the peak time to see all five is from the end of January until the first week of February, when Mercury is at its highest points, according to Sky & Telescope. The display is made possible by the uncommon alignment of all five planets along what is called the “ecliptic” plane of their orbits, according to Jim Green, the planetary science division director at NASA.

“It’s not super often you get to see them all at the same time in the sky; it’s like seeing all of your friends at once,” said Jackie Faherty, an astronomer from the American Museum of Natural History. “There they are, the other rocks or balls of gas that are running around the sun.”

Shanahan says Jupiter is the brightest planet of the group and rises in the east by about 9:30 p.m. It will shine high in the southwest around daybreak and will be near the moon toward the end of the month. Venus is about one-fourth of the way up in the eastern sky at dawn and rises at about 5 a.m. Saturn rises by about 3 a.m. at the end of January and should be above Venus and below Mars before daybreak. Mars is visible at about 1 a.m. and is the slightly-red dot between Venus and Jupiter at dawn. Mercury rises at about 5:30 a.m. and is below Venus.

Those who miss the planetary alignment this time around will have another opportunity from Aug. 13 to 19, when the cosmic motley crew gives an encore performance, according to EarthSky.org. That show will take place in the dusk sky, giving stargazers in the Southern Hemisphere the best vantage points, and Mercury may be even harder to see. The next chance after that is not until 2020.

The New York Times and the Associated Press contributed to this report.