Planet Parade 2026-2028: Planetary Alignment Dates, India

The next stretch of days with five planets on one side of the Sun, each at least 15° from it, begins on 12 November 2026. From then until 25 November 2026, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Uranus will all be west of the Sun, on the morning side of the sky. The next such group east of the Sun, on the evening side, will form on 20 February 2027. Both dates come from one rule this page chose and states below, and a different rule moves them. That is the honest answer to “when is the next planetary alignment”: the phrase has no fixed definition, so a date means something only together with the rule that produced it.

A Parade Is an Arc, Not a Line

The English Wikipedia article on the subject places “planetary parade” in amateur-astronomy usage: several planets seen in the sky at the same time, strung along an arc. It is careful to add that this is not a true alignment in space, only an apparent one from where observers on the Earth stand, and that parades of three to five planets are commonplace. Its see-also list sets the parade apart from a syzygy, where bodies really do lie on one straight line. The planets’ orbits lie close to one plane, so from the Earth they always sit near the ecliptic, the Sun’s yearly path; any planets above the horizon together therefore trace part of that one curve.

“How many planets can be seen” is a separate question that this page does not answer. Brightness, twilight, the horizon at a given place and the weather decide it, and none of them is computed here. What is computed is geometry, the same, to the precision used here, for an observer in India as anywhere else on the Earth: the longitude of each planet along the ecliptic and its angular distance from the Sun, its elongation, for every day from 1 January 2026 to 31 December 2028, 1096 days in all. The rows come from the JPL DE421 ephemeris and are sampled once a day at 17:30 IST, so every date below is good to the day and none carries a time. The planets are the seven from Mercury to Neptune; the Moon is left out because it crosses any line-up in a few days.

The Narrowest Arc Each Year

The first measure is the tightest bunching along the ecliptic: the shortest stretch of longitude that holds every planet in a set, found as the full circle minus the widest empty gap between neighbours. For the five planets from Mercury to Saturn and for all seven, the narrowest arc of each year is:

The minimum is a plateau rather than a single day. In 2026 the five reached 99.6° on 20 April 2026 and stayed within a degree of it for 29 days, to 18 May 2026. The 2026 figure is also the lowest of the three years; the minimum widens to 126.4° in 2027 and 131.5° in 2028. On the loosest day of the table the five need 230°, well over half the circle. Nowhere in the three years do they fit inside a quarter of it.

Why the Tightest Arcs Straddle the Sun

On 20 April 2026, the day of the 2026 minimum, the five planets stood at these elongations: Mercury 22.6° west, Saturn 22.6° west, Mars 22.1° west, Venus 25.1° east, Jupiter 77.1° east. Three were west of the Sun and two east of it, and four of the five were within 25.1° of the Sun. The arc was narrow because it was wrapped around the Sun itself.

That is not a quirk of 2026. On 93% of the days in the table the Sun lies inside the narrowest arc of the five, and it does so on each year’s narrowest day. Mercury and Venus, with orbits smaller than the Earth’s, are only ever seen within a limited angle of the Sun, and a tight bunch that has to include them is pulled towards it. The geometry has a plain consequence. In general a planet east of the Sun trails it in the sky’s daily turn and sets after it, so it belongs to the evening side; a planet west of the Sun rises before it and belongs to the morning side. A tight arc split by the Sun is half an evening group and half a morning group, with its innermost members close to the Sun. That makes the narrowest arc a poor stand-in for planets above the horizon at the same time, which is what the Wikipedia wording describes.

One Side of the Sun: Choosing the Floor

A better geometric stand-in is a count of planets on one side of the Sun and not too close to it. This page counts a planet when its elongation is at least 15°, and calls a day a line-up when five or more planets meet that floor on the same side. The 15° is a choice, not a standard: nothing in astronomy fixes it, and it does not mark the point where a planet becomes visible, which depends on the planet and the place. The table shows what other choices would do.

Every count falls as the floor rises, and the morning side leads at each one: at 15° it holds five or more planets on 201 days against 88 for the evening side. At 20° the evening side never reaches six, while the morning side still does on 13 days. One column hardly moves: the most planets on one side is six at every floor shown. Even with no floor, counting a planet that is a fraction of a degree from the Sun, there is no day in the three years with all seven on one side; six is the most, on 216 days. At 10° the counts are 132 and 235 days, so a reader who prefers that floor will find longer stretches than the ones listed below.

Every Line-Up of Five or More, 2026 to 2028

At the 15° floor the three years hold eight stretches. Shaded rows reach six. The peak day is the day with the most planets meeting the floor and, among those, the one where the member nearest the Sun stands farthest from it. The last column is the arc spanned by those members alone on that day. The three stretches before 28 October 2026 are past; the five from 12 November 2026 onward are ahead.

These line-ups are wide. Apart from one, every stretch spans more than 100° on its peak day, up to 155°, and in each of those some member stands more than 90° from the Sun. The exception is the morning-side stretch of 13 June to 29 September 2028: on 27 June 2028 its six members will fit inside 65.5°, narrower than the 2026 five-planet minimum, with every member under 90° west of the Sun. The planet left out that day will be Jupiter, 74.0° east.

The February 2026 Evening Line-Up

The first stretch of the table ran from 11 to 25 February 2026, when Mercury, Saturn, Neptune, Uranus and Jupiter were all at least 15° east of the Sun. Venus was east of the Sun too, but at 10.6° on the peak day it was inside the floor, and Mars was west of the Sun. With the floor lowered to 10°, Venus counts as well: the evening-side stretch then runs from 4 February to 11 March 2026 and reaches six. This is the clearest case on the page of a threshold deciding the headline number.

The Best 2027 Line-Up, Planet by Planet

No day in 2027 will have six planets on one side at the 15° floor. Among the five-planet days, the one where the member nearest the Sun will stand farthest from it is 20 February 2027, the first day of the evening-side stretch of 20 February to 8 March 2027. In order outward from the Sun, the five will be Neptune at 31.3°, Saturn at 40.6°, Uranus at 90.1°, Jupiter at 169.1° and Mars at 175.4°. Mercury and Venus will be west of the Sun that day.

The stretch will start that day for a geometric reason. Mars will reach opposition, 180° from the Sun, on 19 February 2027, and the next day’s row is the first to place it on the east side; Jupiter will have passed its own opposition on 11 February 2027. So two of the five will sit almost opposite the Sun rather than beside it, and both will be retrograde: every Mars, Jupiter and Saturn opposition in the site’s table falls inside a retrograde. Their opposition dates and distances are on the Mars, Jupiter and Saturn opposition dates page, and their retrograde and shadow dates on the retrograde shadow dates page. Mars will count as “east” by only 4.6° of the circle, which is another reminder that the label is geometry and not a statement about where to look.

Six on One Side, All in 2028

Six planets meet the 15° floor on one side in three of the stretches, and every such day falls in 2028. On the evening side it happens only from 7 to 12 January 2028, inside the long stretch of 30 November 2027 to 24 January 2028, when Mercury, Mars, Venus, Neptune, Saturn and Uranus will all be east of the Sun. On the morning side six will meet the floor in the summer and again in the autumn of 2028. In none of them is the seventh planet on the same side at that floor, which matches the census above.

Other Ways of Counting Planets Together

A line-up in this sense is not a stellium. The stellium dates page counts planets inside one 30° sign, which a line-up never satisfies, since even the tightest one above spans 66°; the grand trine and T-square dates page measures angles between planets instead of their bunching. Two-graha conjunctions are tabled pair by pair on the planetary conjunctions hub. Everything here is seen from the Earth; the heliocentric and geocentric page measures how often a planet’s sign changes when the centre moves to the Sun, a view in which “east or west of the Sun” has no meaning at all.

What This Page Does Not Give

Searches for a parade’s spiritual meaning, its energy or what to do while it lasts are asking for something a table of angles cannot test, so there is none here: no effect on anyone, no ritual, no reading. There is also no verdict on whether a given planet will be seen from a given town on a given evening, and no time of day; a sky chart or planetarium program for the place is the tool for that.

In Brief

• Definition used: five or more of the seven planets Mercury to Neptune on one side of the Sun, each at least 15° from it; the floor is a choice
• Next: morning side, 12 to 25 November 2026; evening side, 20 February to 8 March 2027
• Count: eight stretches in 2026-2028, three of them reaching six; never seven on one side, at any floor
• Narrowest arc: 99.6° for the five planets Mercury to Saturn, from 20 April 2026, wrapped around the Sun
• Tightest one-side group: six planets in 65.5° west of the Sun on 27 June 2028
• Not computed: visibility, times of day, and any meaning