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A search on "planetary alignment" led us to a Yahoo! category with the lengthy title of Planetary Alignment in the Year 2000. From there, we turned our gaze to Truman Collins' personal web site, where we learned that the conjunction of the six inner planets is known as The Grand Alignment. This ominous event last occurred on May 5, 2000, with no dire consequences, despite predictions of doom circulated by Millennial alarmists. Back in May of last year, Mr. Collins, a software engineer, made some calculations and determined that
the effect on our home planet would be negligible. The mission of Phil Plaitt's Bad Astronomy site is to debunk popular astronomy misconceptions and replace them with accurate explanations. Here's what Phil had to say about the Harmonic Con(game)vergence of May 2000: Bad astronomy: Planetary alignments will cause earthquakes.
Good astronomy: Planetary alignments have relatively little to do with earthquakes. The folks at NASA's National Space Science Data Center agreed. Alignment events occur roughly every 50 to 100 years. Because the planets Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn are so distant from
Earth, even when they line up more or less in a row with the Sun and the Moon, the alignment has little effect on Earth's tides or gravitational forces, although it does seem to affect earthling imagination. If you have an online movie player on your desktop, you can watch a quick little animation of the planets moving into alignment back on May 5, 2000. Now that's what we call good astronomy!
Editor's Note: A host of helpful readers wrote in to suggest that the word Marjorie was thinking of was syzygy, which refers to the "alignment of three bodies of the solar system along a straight or nearly straight line." Thanks,
readers!
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