The Planetary Parade Panic
Hey everyone,
In this blog post, I’ll be talking about my experience at the Gilbert Rotary Centennial Observatory during the planetary alignment on February 28th. To start with, no, a planetary alignment does not mean all the planets layer on top of each other like in the Hercules movie. It means that most, if not all, of the planets are all in the sky and are available to look at at one time. That’s why I and many other astronomers refer to it as a planetary parade since they all move throughout the night sky together in a sequence. Also, planetary parades are not a rare occurrence. They can last for weeks, if not longer. While some of the planets might not be visible after “the date”, most of the others will still be in the night sky long after. For example, Saturn won’t be visible after sunset until this coming winter, but Jupiter will be visible for several more weeks. However, media like the news and TikTok like to portray it as being a “limited one-time occurrence where the planets are all visible right next to each other that you’ll never see again!!!!” for clicks and views, so people rush to a telescope to try to get a glimpse at it.
At the observatory, we usually get 200-300 visitors in a night from sunset to 9:30pm when we close, so we were expecting a little more than that. What actually happened though, is a gigantic line several hundred people long formed, and it took about 3 hours to get from the end of the line to the observatory. Considering that we are only open for that long, its insane that people were waiting in the gigantic line. We ended up having to stay until the park closes at 10pm, and we had around 500 visitors, with many more still waiting. We told all of them that they could come back next time and see the same things, but the were still very disappointed because of the false idea of the planetary alignment that was told to them. We are all still baffled over how many people showed up.
Unfortunately, we have another special event coming up. This Thursday/Friday at midnight, there will be a blood moon eclipse. We’ll be open from 9pm to 1am since we got special permission from the park to be open later. We are hoping that it won’t be too busy, but after the planetary parade we aren’t sure. It’s a naked eye event so we won’t really be using the telescope, but if you’re interested feel free to stop by for a bit. Binoculars would be helpful too!
For this post’s picture, it’s one I took at this previous week’s astronomy night at Mesa Community College. We were watching a video about the origin of the atoms that make up everything, and at the moment I took it it was talking about the most basic elements have been combined over time in stars to create the materials necessary to form our galaxy.
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