The Jan. 2025 Planetary Parade: images and podcast
We are pleased to share some images of the ongoing planetary parade, with six planets visibile at a glance, taken from our robotic facility in Italy. We also provide the podcast of our live feed, covering this show.
Mars, Pollux and Castor, imaged on 26 Jan. 2025 planetary parade.
All the images of this post were remotely taken with the Samyang 135+Paramount ME+ZWO ASI 6200MC Pro robotic unit available as part of the Virtual Telescope Project facility in Manciano, Italy, under the darkest skies of the Italian peninsula, unless otherwise noted.
These weeks, we can see six planets up there at the same time: Saturn, Venus, Jupiter and Mars, all of them visible to the naked eye, plus Uranus and Neptune, requiring modest binoculars: literally, a planetary parade. By the way, let us underline this: we prefer to call it “parade“, not alignment, as the latter term suggests the involved objects to be visible along the same line of sight, in the same spot of the sky, which is NOT what is happening now.
What we are seeing is, after all, a parade: all the planets mentioned above are visible together, but they are spread along the Zodiac, from West to East, spanning for about 130 degrees. Look at the image below, coming from our all-sky camera and note how the naked eye planets are actually distributed along such a long arc.
A bright meteor with the planetary parade, imaged on 18 Jan. 2025.
The westernmost planets of the current parade are Venus and Saturn, visible soon after sunset, before they eventually set. In the same region of the sky we also have Neptune, so we managed to capture all of them, as in the image below. Some thin clouds were there, creating a nice, colorful corona around Venus.
Venus (with a nice colorful corona), Saturn and Neptune. 26 Jan. 2025
The image is dominated by the amazing brightness of Venus, at the time of writing the closest planet to our Earth (84 millions of km) and the brightest object of the night sky after the Moon. Saturn was at about 1.5 billions of km, while Neptune was at about 4.5 billions of km. Out of curiosity, Neptune is the farthest planet from the Sun and in our sky it is 1/100.000th the brightness of Venus.
Then we have Uranus, at 2.9 billions of km from us, at the limit of the naked eye capabilities.
Uranus, imaged on 26 Jan. 2025.
Moving East, we meet the planetary giant Jupiter, at 670 millions of km from us, dominating in the center of the sky, right now apparently close to the famous and nice star Aldebaran (at 65 light years from the Sun).
Jupiter with the beautiful star Aldebaran, Alpha Tauri. 26 Jan. 2025.
A few open star clusters are also visibile, making the image so elegant.
The last object of the parade is Mars, the Red Planet. Right now it is shining in the same spot of the sky hosting Castor and Pollux, offering an amazing view and a precious opportunity to grab a wonderful image, as the one we show again below:
Mars, Pollux and Castor, imaged during the Jan. 2025 planetary parade.
We shared the wonderful opportunity to spot so many planets at a glance with thousand of people from all over the world: if you missed the live feed, please find the podcast below.
The parade will be visible for a few weeks from now, so find the time to have a look!
Support The Virtual Telescope Project!
Support us! Please, donate and receive an EXCLUSIVE image of the stunning COMET C/2023 A3 Tsuchinshan-ATLAS and much more, specifically made for supporters like you!
