Invisible by day and making only occasional cameos by night, the planets are typically sporadic in their appearances over Earth. But in early August, six of them—seven if we include Earth—will align in a small sector of the sky before dawn.
It’s astronomically rare for so many celestial objects to line up so perfectly in space. However, the planets follow very roughly the same elliptic around the sun, corresponding to the sun’s sky path as seen from Earth, so when cosmic timing causes several planets to sync up along their orbits, they form a rather rag-tag procession for Earth observers. And if you wait long enough, they'll all line up.
