Earthlings Have Great Seat For Align Dance

Seven planets ready to stage two-day performance Tonight and Thursday, nature cues up a special show a curl of seven planets, starting at the horizon and gently sloping high, glowing in the post-dusk sky.

Telescopes aren’t needed to view five of them, though such a third eye would come in handy for spying Uranus and Neptune. Local sky watchers are excited because seeing all the “naked-eyed planets” together is a once-in-a-lifetime treat.

Wait until sunset. Then wait just a little longer. As the stars first begin to wink, look for the sliver of a moon in the southwest sky and use it as a guide.

Tonight, you’ll see Venus, cold and blue-white, just below the crescent. Thursday, Jupiter will beam not far off the tip of the moon’s lower crescent point.

“It’s like watching the solar system in action,” said Robert Gibbs, head of Eastern Washington University’s physics department. “… They’re doing a little dance.”

Although the brightest orbs can compete with the city lights, the best viewing happens up high, in the open, in the country. Gerald Achenbach, director of EWU’s planetarium, suggests a field on Five Mile Prairie or Eastern’s football field parking lot.

“That one’s perfect because Cheney is a lot smaller,” he said. “We don’t have a lot of background light.”

One of the big coups here is a visible Mercury. Look low, toward the horizon, and don’t try more than an hour after sunset. Any buildings will obscure it.

It’s a big deal because sun-hugging Mercury is only visible a few days each year. “There are only three or four good (days of) what we call ‘apparitions,”’ said Dan Bakken, president of the Spokane Astronomical Society.

“It’s a great opportunity, especially for beginning astronomers, to see so many planets at once.”

Planets stand out amid the velvet field of twinkling because their light is steady, unlike stars. Venus is the brightest, “almost like an aircraft coming in for landing,” Bakken said. Jupiter burns bright and white. Mercury and Saturn show yellow. Mars glares orange-red.

The other aligned planets are tougher to see. Uranus glows green. Neptune is blue. That’s seven, leaving Earth and …

“Pluto? Forget about Pluto,” Gibbs said. “You never see Pluto. It’s too small and too far out.”

Does it all sound cosmic? Colossal? Catastrophic? Relax, say astronomers. The solar satellites only look weirdly aligned.

Bakken describes it like this: “The solar system is generally in a plane, and the planets go around it like a turntable.”

Now, things just happen to be right to see it.

For some, though, it’s no mere empirical event.

“This has been something the spiritual and metaphysical circles have been talking about for a long time … especially because of the millennium,” said AnneMarie, who doesn’t use a last name and directs Conscious Living, a Spokane business that sponsors New Age events.

Muriel Hastings, who advertises her Seattle business as “Down to Earth Astrology,” said it’s a busy time.

“Because the planet alignments are happening in the sign of Capricorn and Aquarius, what is happening on a social basis and on a global basis is a real push for the combination of old and new.”

Huh?

“Capricorn is all about tradition, Aquarius is all about visionary things,” she explained.

“In other words, there’s a lot of upheaval.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Graphic: The planets align