Tonight in Saudi Arabia.. an amazing celestial alignment seen with the naked eye

In the sky of the Arab world, after sunset today, Friday, June 16, 2023, and at the beginning of the night, the planets Venus, Mars, and the star of the Heart of the Lion are observed on the western horizon, in an event easily seen with the naked eye.

The head of the Astronomical Society in Jeddah, Majid Abu Zahra, said that the line-up is an astronomical event that takes place when a number of planets of our solar system appear in approximately one row, in the same region of the sky, in addition to the moon or a bright star as seen from Earth, and in space it is on the same side of the sky. The sun and this phenomenon has no effect on the Earth.

He continued: The alignment of the planets on one line is not in the literal sense, as the planets never line up in a perfectly straight line because they do not all revolve around the sun at the same level, but rather in different orbits.

It is preferable to start observing the sky before nightfall, when Venus will be the first to be present, bright, vibrant and very bright, and when observed through a small telescope, less than half of its disk will be illuminated by the sun.

Venus and Mars

And he added: Mars is very faint compared to Venus, and it is very far from Earth now and very small in the sky, and it will not be suitable for observation with a telescope, because everything that will appear is an orange point except when using a large telescope, and finally the heart of the Lion is joined by a star of the first magnitude, and it is the only star between Most of the bright stars that are found almost on the annual apparent path of the sun in front of the constellations in the zodiacal circle, and this star is also called (Aleph) the lion as it is called (the sickle star), if it was isolated with the five stars adjacent to it from the rest of the stars of the lion, we would get a shape similar to that of the lion The sickle, and (the sickle star) represents the hand of that sickle.

It is now noticed that Venus and Mars have shrunk the apparent distance between them compared to the beginning of this June, and they are on their way to conjunction at the end of this month.