You will not see this alignment if you are at the south pole or other points sufficiently south of the antarctic circle, either, given the time of year.
I remember all the dooms day articles the last time, then I think all 8 aligned. That is what Voyagers used to get to the outer planets quickly and were they are now.
This time, I saw nothing about "world ending". I guess they moved on to other things. Too bad NASA was not funded enough to use this to launch a more advanced spacecraft :(
It’d be cool as hell if we were destroyed by some grand universal conspiracy. Instead, we’re doomed by the same force that makes the office lunch group unable to gather consensus around anything other than cheese pizza.
What would you recommend as entry level beginner telescope? Is it worth observing all this via a telescope?
Telescopes are a bit of a rabbit hole. Many cheap mass market telescopes are also known as hobby killers. A 6" dobsonian (reflector) is a good starting point for deep space objects like nebulae and star clusters. For planetary viewing Schmidt-Cassegrain telescopes are great.
However, learning to use a telescope requires time and patience. Taking it to the field for an event like this for the first time may be frustrating as you will be spending most of the time figuring out how to collimate and align it.
I certainly don't mean to discourage you from getting one though.
A good pair of binoculars is much easier to use. They require no collimation out of the box and show an upright image that makes it much easier to navigate the sky, at the cost of reduced magnification and light gathering capability. You will be surprised how many celestial objects even 10x magnification reveals that are invisible to the naked eye.
Happy planet gazing!
For most of the last 50 years I would have said order from Orion Telescopes, but they abruptly disappeared last July.
For example, this is an extremely commonly recommended for serious beginners that is sold by them: https://www.highpointscientific.com/apertura-ad8-8-inch-dobs...
You can click a pic with a wide-angle lens (whether on your phone or a camera).
Yes.
> I thought planets just show up as a bright dot in the sky.
Correct. :)
There's no real way to get around that geometry problem, you can either see several at once but they're pinpricks or one at a time but potentially somewhat more clearly.
I took photos of both Jupiter and Saturn w/ a Canon R7 and the RF 100-500mm lens, with a 1.4x extender. The 1.4x extender make the lens act like 700mm instead of 500mm. The R7 being an APS-C sensor adds another 1.6x factor, making the combo the equivalent of 1120mm. In these photos the planets are still just dots. The camera takes 32.5 megapixel photos. When zoomed in to the pixel level, both planets were still tiny, about 50 pixels wide. It was enough to see Saturn had a ring and some color striping on Jupiter, but that's it.
The iPhone main camera is like 26mm (42x less zoom). The iPhone 13 Pro's telephoto lens is 77mm (14.5x less zoom), and the iPhone 15 Pro Max is 120mm (9.3x less zoom)... so you're unlikely to get much more than what looks like an out of focus few pixel wide dot even on the zoomiest of iPhones, but with that wider 26mm lens, you just might be able to capture them all in one shot.
To me, what's more technically impressive than the fact I took pictures of the planets with readily available camera gear was that I did with 1/125s shutter speed, handheld, standing in my yard. The accuracy of the image stabilization needed to pull that off is what astounded me the most.
Another point in favor of binoculars for people living out of the city is that places out of the city often have more wildlife. Binoculars can be great for observing that.
When choosing binoculars there are a couple tradeoffs. Binoculars are listed as M x D, where M is the magnification and D is the diameter of the lenses in mm. For M here are some considerations:
• Bigger M makes things look bigger.
• Bigger M also reduces the field of view.
• The smaller the field of view the steadier you will need to be able to hold the binoculars to keep something in the field of view. A magnification of 15 for example would probably be useless for most people who are not using a tripod and trying to keep a flying bird in view. Actually it would probably even by hard with a tripod. But for looking at something that isn't moving (or whose apparent motion is very slow like a planet) 15 might work by hand and would be a piece of cake with a tripod.
For D some considerations are:
• The bigger the D the more light the lenses gather, letting you see dimmer objects.
• The bigger the D the more the binoculars weigh which makes it harder to keep them steady without a tripod and tires you out faster.
Another thing you might want to consider is the "close focus distance". Binoculars can focus on things from the close focus distance to infinity. For binoculars meant for astronomy the close focal distance can be 50 feet or more. Not a problem when you are looking at the Moon, but might be if you want to take a look at a squirrel frolicking in your yard.
Binoculars meant for wildlife will have a much shorts close focal distance. For example I've got Celestron's Nature DX 8x42 binoculars [1] and their close focus distance is 6.5 feet.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Celestron-71332-Nature-Binocular-Gree...
The week after the most recent US eclipse the media started reporting on every single celestial event, no matter how small. The eclipse got so much traction that it seems like they were trying to drag it out as long as possible.
Any given one of these events might be especially rare, but that's the birthday paradox in action: if you're looking for it you can find any number of rare celestial events in a year!
With this comment, I shall evilly spoil this particular 'alignment' ;-)
(this is a joke, because hn)
You don't want people excluded from the hobby on both ends - those that enjoy something particular should not be put down for enjoying it and those of the opposite opinion shouldn't be made to feel they must not be a real hobbyist as a result. Everyone should be able to talk about what they personally do and don't like about it while still enjoying the hobby overall.
edit: to those downvoting me, can you explain why?
It is rare because the further the planets are from the sun, the longer their orbit periods are. While Earth completes the circle in just a bit above 365 days, Neptune for example takes nearly 165 years to do a round trip. So it would take some time for the slower planets to meet again in the same region in the sky.
If you are in a planet, there is a line to any other planet. Two planets form a line. Three planets form a triangle. Four planets form some irregular polygon of four sides. And so on.
In this case, the area of the polygon formed by the seven planets is minimal, for a period of several years, and they are effectively, almost in a line.
This is not a common occurrence.
