This past summer (ah, hard to come to grips with the fact that summer is coming to an end!) there was some amount of hype around a fun planetary alignment. If you are tuned into the social media promotion of these things, you realize that they’re fairly common even though they’re all unique. This one at first sounds way more exciting than it actually looks; but then when you realize what’s happening it is sublime in its simplicity. Here’s a photo out my bedroom window, looking west-ish after sunset June 9, 2026:

The two brightest of these dots of light in the sky aren’t stars, but planets, and my phone camera could pick them up pretty clearly even though it isn’t close to dark out. This is verified by using Stellarium, a web-based app that can allow you to go forward or backward in time, looking at the sky from anywhere on the planet. Here’s what it showed for roughly this same time from the same location:

Here’s the thing that I think is especially lovely: I know that Jupiter is farther from the Sun than Earth, but Venus is closer to the Sun than Earth. So, it’s a bit of a puzzle to work out to figure how both of these can be seen so close to one another. This is where models are especially useful.

I’ve worked with science teachers to figure out what the model could look like and how we use them. I’ll leave it as an exercise to go back into Stellarium and paste in different dates to see what happens to this alignment. For example, here’s a few days before:

and here’s a few days after:

Notice that they look similar, but Venus and Jupiter have switched places. Also, a slight change in the sky’s darkness is apparent as well. You could come up with a model to figure out:

1. How is this happening?
2. What are the relative speeds and directions of these planets (including Earth)?
3. Why is it important that this is taking place close to sunset? When else could this occur?
4. Bonus question: What phases (like lunar phases) could Venus and Jupiter be in? Why, and how does your model show this? In Stellarium, you can zoom in on a planet and see its phase and how it changes!

The kind of model I’m thinking that would be useful here is primarily a physical model. It is usually drawn out or otherwise diagramed, show what pieces go where. But this is only one kind of model. Other (and usually even more interesting) natural phenomena need a model that describe a process or event, so that model would have to show dynamic exchanges or stages. Take, for example, if we wondered why Venus (and other terrestrial planets) are so different from Jupiter (and other Jovian planets) and how that all could have taken shape during the same solar system development? You’d first want to look for patterns, some correlations that might have causes, and then use some big scientific ideas about energy, forces (especially gravity), and other astronomical features to explain how this takes shape.

I’d leave that as an exercise for the reader, as they say, but some resources you might turn to include:

• NASA planet facts
• JPL’s planet data
• This handout from Clark Planetarium via Jordan School District
• Some slides I used to guide this discussion in Davis School District in August 2026.