Observers in the Arab world are preparing for the alignment of four bright planets in the morning sky just before sunrise on Wednesday, April 20, 2022, and the conditions for its visibility will be better than the triple alignment last March.
According to the Jeddah Astronomical Society, all the planets will form the alignment, which is Jupiter, Saturn, Mars and Venus, which will be visible to the naked eye above the southeastern horizon, and the horizon must be completely exposed to see Jupiter, which will be at a lower altitude than the other planets.
The alignment of the planets is an astronomical event that takes place when a group of the planets of the solar system appears in approximately one row in the same region of the sky, as seen from Earth and in space, being on the same side of the sun.
The most recent planet alignments occurred on April 18, 2002, and then on July 4, 2020, when all the planets of the solar system visible to the naked eye lined up in a row in the evening sky, and such planetary alignments will repeat in 2040 and 2854.
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It must be known that the alignment of the planets on one line should not be taken in the literal sense. The planets never line up in a perfectly straight line, since they do not all revolve around the sun in the same plane, but rather in different orbits, so they will never line up identically.
It is worth noting that this alignment occurs days before an exceptional conjunction between Venus and Jupiter, where the order of the planets will change following the day of alignment, as Jupiter will rise away from the horizon and approach Venus in preparation for the best conjunction that will be seen with the naked eye at the end of April and early May 2022.
