Overview

• Best viewing comes about an hour before sunrise toward a clear eastern horizon, with Mercury popping up roughly 45 minutes before sunrise.
• Venus, Jupiter and Saturn are easy naked-eye targets, Mercury sits very low, and Uranus and Neptune require binoculars or a small telescope.
• Venus and Jupiter appear about 12 degrees apart in the eastern sky, roughly the width of a fist at arm’s length.
• NASA notes Mercury remains below 10 degrees altitude, which makes it difficult to spot, and the Moon is absent during this window for darker skies.
• This is a line-of-sight arrangement along the ecliptic rather than a true alignment, with the next multi-planet viewing opportunity projected for October 2028.