TYLER, Texas — The TJC Earth and Space Science Center is preparing for a celestial event that will result in up to six planets visible to stargazers.
"You'll be able to see up to six planets in the sky all at one time: Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn," Dr. Beau Hartweg, the director of the TJC Earth and Space Science Center, said. "Those are the ones you'll be able to see with your own eyes. And then if you have a telescope, you might also be able to see Uranus and Neptune.
Hartweg says the best way to locate the planets for those who haven't experienced a celestial event like this before is to find the moon, and draw an imaginary line from the moon to the east and west.
"The planets are going to appear, kind of somewhere along that line again, then we call it the ecliptic line," Hartwell said. "The best way that we tell people to identify a planet versus a star is to think back from their early education days, and that song that we taught twinkle twinkle, little star, we were actually teaching you some science in that song, and that's because stars will appear to twinkle in the sky."
But planets, he said, don't twinkle.
"Since they're closer, their light doesn't get distorted by the atmosphere as much, and so they don't twinkle. So if you see kind of a brighter object that is not twinkling, there's a good chance that you're actually looking at a planet and not a star."
The next time a similar planetary alignment will occur is in January, making this the last event of 2024 that sky watchers will be able to catch the spectacle.