Planets align but clouds may have obstructed the view

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If you had your eyes to the sky Tuesday evening you may have noticed a special alignment.

Just after sunset, Jupiter and Mercury were close to the horizon, just above that was the brightest planet Venus, a dim, greenish looking star was Uranus and a reddish/orange looking star was Mars.

This information is according to Jan Cami, a Professor in the Department of Physics & Astronomy at Western University, and the Director of the Hume Cronyn Memorial Observatory.

There were some clouds on the western horizon so the planets may have been difficult to see from this region.

According to Cami, the alignment was visible because of the layout of our solar system.

"All planets orbit the Sun in approximately the same plane, so you could think of the solar system as a pancake with an egg yolk at the centre that represents the Sun perhaps. The Earth of course is in that pancake, so if we look at other planets, we are always looking in that plane of the pancake, which to us looks like a line in the sky," she told CTV News.

While it would have been interesting to see, Cami said to see the five planets fairly close to each other in the sky, is actually not super rare.

"They happen every couple of years. In fact, last June there was an alignment where the planets were visible early in the morning, in order of increasing distance from the Sun. What changes is the position of the planets. Having all eight planets of the solar system align like this is much rarer."

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