Myles Standish? Bless the parents with the nerve to keep that name alive.

He's not only speaking for himself, but for JPL too!

I thought we saw this last year?

What happened a couple of years ago was that Mars, Saturn and Jupiter were all close to opposition around the same time, making the three look close together in the sky. Some whakos believed that the gravitational force of having them aligned would cause tidal waves, earthquakes, etc., and that got some play in the media. Of course, the masses of those planets are so insignificant compared to the Sun, that the combined effect on the tides was to raise them something like .00001 inch (or something like that...I can't recall the exact order of magnitude, but it was essentially insignificant).

A few things of interest in the current grouping of planets:
1) over the next week or so, the Moon will pass close to each of the planets. Watching that night-to-night (as well as drawing an imaginary line through the 5 planets...well, 4 more likely, unless you have a very clear view to the West horizon you won't see Mercury) will give one a sense of the "ecliptic", which is the plane that all the planets sit on in their journey around the Sun. Another way to describe the ecliptic (for OJ and any other non-Copernicans out there)is that it is the apparent path that the Sun travels across our sky during the year.

2) The rings of Saturn are well-tilted now as seen from Earth, so are very easy to see in a small telescope.

3) Jupiter is angled such that its 4 largest moons are easy to spot as they move across the face of the planet. Actually, what you'll see in a small telescope is not the moons themselves, but their shadows, which appear as pin point black spots. At 3 am Sunday (EST) all 4 shadows should be visible on the planet at one time.

4) Unfortunately, after its spectacularly close pass this summer, Mars is now just a small tan smudge in amateur telescopes. But still cool to look at and realize that it's not a star, but a rocky planet, where 2 Earth-made rovers are now rolling around.

5) Although very bright and "round" to the naked eye, in a telescope Venus appears as a thin crescent. When Galileo saw that, he was able to deduce that the Earth did, indeed, orbit around the Sun.

If you don't have a telescope, sometime in the next to weeks visit your local observatory/planetarium or local astronomy club "star party" for a view of the planets. It's worth the effort.

Foos:

Excellent explanation.

One other thing. Because the planets serve as "stationary" reference points, if one has a little patience, one can actually see the moon move.

The moon subtends about 13 degrees of arc per day, or about a half degree per hour, or, roughly, a moon-width every couple hours.

You can almost hear the gears meshing.