The bad news is that we won't able to see it, because the Sun is in the midst of the parade of planets and will hide most of them in its dazzling glare. An even tighter configuration -- this time without the Moon -- will occur (again out of view) on the 17th.

World Will Note End
The upcoming planetary alignment has prompted some people to speculate that on May 5th tidal waves will wash away coastal cities, California will fall into the Pacific, earthquakes with unheard-of intensity will shake our planet's crust, and/or Earth's poles will wobble wildly when great slabs of ice become heaped upon them.

"Let's get real," says Alan MacRobert, an associate editor and sky-gazing specialist at Sky & Telescope magazine. "Nothing like that is going happen."

Recently, astronomers Donald W. Olson and Thomas E. Lytle (Southwest Texas State University) rigorously assessed how the combined gravitational pull of the Sun, Moon, and planets affects Earth.

Their results show that the collective tidal effect from May's planetary alignment is unremarkable and has no discernible effect on us. In fact it pales when compared, for example, to the tides raised by last December 22nd's especially close full Moon.

Similarly, the planets' combined tidal pull on the Sun this month, while above average, is matched or exceeded a few times per century, most recently on January 6, 1990. Olson and Lytle's results appear in the May 2000 issue of Sky & Telescope and can be viewed online.

The May issue also carries astronomer-historian Bradley Schaefer's fascinating look at how planet conjunctions (pairings and groupings) really have changed history -- through superstition on the part of people from Genghis Kahn to Rudolf Hess.

How This All Got Started
May 2000's planet pileup was first noticed nearly 40 years ago by Belgian astronomer Jean Meeus.

At that time, personal computers and hand-held pocket calculators did not exist, so Meeus performed the painstaking calculations using elaborate tables of planetary positions.

His results, which included the prediction for May 5, 2000, appeared in the December 1961 issue of Sky & Telescope.

"Some people seem obsessed by groupings or 'alignments' of planets," Meeus observes, "and it's quite likely that this article instigated the later astrological musings, since it was the first reference to the May 2000 grouping."

Meeus's calculations show that close approaches of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn are unusual but hardly Earth-shaking.

For example, on February 5, 1962, the Sun, Moon, and these five planets spanned just 16 degrees of sky. On that date French President Charles de Gaulle called for Algeria's independence and a total eclipse of the Sun was seen over Indonesia, but little else of consequence transpired.

In the interval from 1000 to 2400 A.D., Meeus found that the very tightest five-planet grouping (5.7 degrees wide) came and went uneventfully on June 25, 710.

Meeus detailed his findings about May's planetary alignment, how the fuss all began, and how it compares with others in a 1997 Sky & Telescope article Why Panic.

SPACE SCIENCE
Jupiter May Have Shifted Orbits
Anna Arbor - November 16, 1999 - A new analysis of data collected by the Galileo spacecraft's suicide probe as it plunged into Jupiter's roiling atmosphere in December 1995 has stamped a huge question mark over the prevailing models of how our solar system began.