The ecliptic is also the reason that we on Earth sometimes observe planets appearing to approach closely to each other in the sky "while they careen around the cosmic racetrack," according to NASA.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/GSFC HELSINKI — China plans to send a space observatory out of the plane of the ecliptic for a mission to study the poles of the sun. The Solar Polar Orbit Observatory ...

The planets are always actually lined up, but we just can't see them all at once. The planets are always in a line called an ecliptic – the plane where they orbit the Sun. As the planets race around ...

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