"By the way, it is now May 6, 2000 and we are all still here. For those of you who never get outside much more, preferring to perpetually surf the web, I thought I would add this note to you as a reminder! " (Dr. Sten Odenwald, May 6, 2000)
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Although we could not see the actual conjunction because of the bright Sun, the NASA SOHO satellite manufactures its own eclipse, blocking the glare of the Sun and allowing many of the planets involved to be seen! For more detaile, and several great movies of the conjunction from space, visit www.spaceweather.com |
Answer: YES..YES...YES there will, and it is called a Grand Conjunction. Astrologers like to use the word 'Alignment' but astronomers hardly ever use that word because it is not very precise. Because the planets are located on the Ecliptic plane as viewed from Earth, they are always 'lined up' across the sky! A normal planetary conjunction is when two planets or more come very close together on the sky, however, Grand Conjunction is sometimes used to describe a collection of planets, viewed from the Earth, which are spread over the sky in a small enough region of the sky so that a dramatic 'lining up' seems to occur. I guess astrologers call this an 'alignment' but that is a less useful term because, since planets are only found along the Ecliptic plane in the sky, they are automatically in a line! Another kind of planetary configuration involves the view from the Sun, where planets would be in the right parts of their orbits so that, from the Sun, they would look like they are in a line pointed towards the Sun. This is a much smaller sub-set of the Grand Conjunctions seen from Earth's perspective. Depending on where the Earth is in its orbit, you can have a Grand Conjunction, but not necessarily what you might call a Grand 'alignment' as viewed from the Sun. This confusion over what to call it 'conjunction' or 'alignment' makes for countless headaches.
Answer: NO...NO...NO. There have been many Grand Conjunctions in the past, perhaps as often as 2 per century, and compared to all the excitement we get from what the good old Moon and Sun do to the Earth via tidal action, planetary gravitational influences are of no consequence. However, PEOPLE can talk themselves into all sorts of bad things, so if we THINK that May 5, 2000 will be a bad year for us as individuals, that will surely come to pass, but it will have nothing whatever to do with the 'stars'. The fault lies in ourselves! For more on this, visit Phil Plaits Bad Astronomy pages and his essay on this conjunction. Brian Monson also has a great Planetary Conjunctions page that shows the planet locations at this time.
Answer: MORE OFTEN THAN YOU THINK! I just did a random check of interesting Grand Conjunctions between 1649 and 1600 AD and found one that is at least as dramatic as the May 5, 2000 event. To get the major bright planets within 50 degrees of the Sun happens about 5 times in the 50 year period I looked at, so once a decade you get an INTERESTING conjunction, and perhaps one of these is as visually interesting as the May 5, 2000 conjunction!
