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SOHO Captures Planets En Route to Planetary Alignment
posted: 07:00 am ET
05 May 2000
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soho_three_aligned_000505 SOHO, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory hovering partway between Earth and the sun imaged three planets -- Mercury, Jupiter and Saturn -- as they approached an imaginary line in space.The three planets are all on the far side of the sun, so the SOHO image provides the only window to the event for earthbound viewers. 
Animations of this rare event include two coronal mass ejections from the sun with the three planets in the background. SOHO, a joint NASA/European Space Agency mission, has the upper-hand over most Earth-based astronomers since it uses coronagraphs, devices that block out the sun's light allowing nearby stars and planets, as well as the sun's faint corona, to shine through. The three planets were caught by SOHO on May 4 on their way to the Friday May 5 rendezvous with Mars and Venus. These five naked-eye planets -- Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn -- will cluster together on the far side of the sun in a planetary alignment. The planets will not be in a perfectly straight line, though their approximate alignment in a 25 degree-wide region of the sky has triggered speculation that interplanetary tidal forces might be magnified, leading to extraordinary effects here on Earth. 
"Spring tides" -- peak ocean tides that arise bimonthly-- occur when the sun, the moon and Earth are nearly in a straight line around the times of the new moon and full moon. Ocean and crustal tides on Earth will be indistinguishable from normal on May 5th. As a matter of fact, tidal forces from Jupiter and the other planets will actually be at a low ebb this week.
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