If you’re on social media, by now you might have seen the breathless announcements of a planetary alignment on January 25, 2025. A flurry of videos and memes is claiming that all eight planets will be in a line on one side of the sun and visible in our nighttime sky. Is it true? Nope. Why January 25? We have no idea. But there will be six planets in our evening sky throughout January. And yes, they’re in a line … like always.

The planets in our solar system orbit our sun more or less in a flat plane. The Earth-sun plane – called the ecliptic – more or less defines the plane of the planets and sun. So, in our sky, the planets always appear somewhere along a line. That line across our sky – the path of the sun and moon – is just a 2-dimensional representation of the 3-dimensional plane of our solar system.

So the planets always travel in a line across our sky. And that means that – if there’s more than one planet up there … it always lines up with any other planet (and the moon and sun).

And in January 2025 there are four bright planets – and two faint planets – in the evening sky. Yup. They’re arrayed in a line across the sky.

Planets on January 25, 2025


So what will the sky look like on January 25, 2025? Below you’ll find two views of the sky with all six planets – the four bright ones and the two exceedingly faint ones – as seen from mid-latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere. Below them, you’ll find more charts, showing what that view looks like from the point of view of someone hovering in space above our solar system.

So you can see that, yes, the planets in the evening sky are arrayed across our sky in a line. Planets in our solar system, when they are visible, are always in a line because they follow the path of the sun – the ecliptic – across our sky. But they aren’t in a line stretching out, one behind another, from the sun, into 3-dimensional space.

And Mercury isn’t even in the evening sky. It’s in the morning sky in January 2025.

Planets near the moon in January 2025


So the planets in our solar system orbit in a flat plane around the sun. And that’s why we always see them arrayed in a line – along the path of the sun – in our sky. And not just the planets, but the moon, too, travels along this path. So, every month, the moon passes planets.

On January 3, 2025, the crescent moon was close to Venus.

On January 4, the crescent moon is closer to Saturn.

By January 5, the moon is near Neptune.

On January 9, the moon is near Uranus. Depending on your location on the globe, you might find it among the stars of the Pleiades star cluster.

On January 10, the moon is alongside Jupiter, still tracking the ecliptic, or sun’s path.

By January 13, the full moon cozies up to Mars in the east.



A great planetary alignment?


So the January 25, 2025, great planetary alignment idea does have a grain of truth. But … the planets aren’t going to be strung out on one side of the sun, one behind another.

The team at EarthSky has been presenting night sky information for nearly 50 years. And we’ve seen the term great planetary alignment tossed around now and again, probably first with the idea of a Jupiter Effect in the 1970s and ’80s. Has it ever been true? No.

But could it be true? Could all eight major planets in our solar system – Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune – make a single line on one side of the sun? When will that happen? The answer, apparently, is never. In Jean Meeus’ book Mathematical Astronomy Morsels, he said our eight planets will line up to within 3.6 degrees of sky every 396 billion years. The sun is currently about 4.6 billion years old and will bloat into a red giant some 5 to 6 billion years from now, swallowing the inner planets in the process.

So, no, we’ll never see the planets form a line on one side of the sun.

But, sometimes, we can appreciate the beauty and wonder of seeing several bright planets arrayed across our sky. And January 2025 is one of those times!