Rare Planetary Parade over Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona

Rare Planetary Parade over Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona

This image captured the planetary parade of Saturn, Neptune, Venus, and Mercury on March 2, 2026.  Petr Horálek, the photographer, is a NOIRLab Audiovisual Ambassador.

A planetary conjunction occurs when two planets appear close together in the sky along the ecliptic, though they remain millions of miles apart in space. The ecliptic is the apparent path of the Sun across the celestial sphere over the course of a year, forming the plane of Earth's orbit and serving as a key reference in astronomy.

Kitt Peak National Observatory is located on Kitt Peak in the Quinlan Mountains, 56 miles southwest of Tucson, Arizona, on the Tohono O’odham Nation. With more than twenty optical and two radio telescopes, it is one of the largest gatherings of astronomical instruments in the Earth's northern hemisphere.

Kitt Peak National Observatory was founded in 1958. It is home to what was the largest solar telescope in the world, and many large astronomical telescopes of the late 20th century in the United States. The observatory was administered by the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) from the early 1980s until 2019, after which it was overseen by NOIRLab.

Image Credit: KPNO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/P. Horálek (Institute of Physics in Opava)
Release Date: July 22, 2026

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