Hi,

I think you summarised the potential impact quite well, but it could be noted that they will probably impact a very small minority of people whose life management is influenced by planets and stars.

Another thing to consider is the lack of science as the information is reported in the medias. Every time, you will see a graphic representation of the planets being aligned in a single file in front of the Sun, which is not correct at all. There is no such a thing as a planet alignment, but what will happen is that these planets will appear in the same portion of the sky at the same time in a more or less same direction. It will be very brief as some (in the Norhern Hemisphere) will set very early on and disapeas over the horizon fairly quickly.

This is a bit like the constellations and the astronomical signs, you need a bit of imagination to see a swan or a great bear in the sky!

Try this link, it shows the correct positions of the planets:

https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/news/planetary-alignment-2025

Absolutely none. Although alignments can look interesting, the effect of each planet's gravity on the motion of the other planets is so negligible that although there is an infinitesimal alteration of each planets' orbit each time one laps the other, in any given century or millennium such effects almost completely cancel them out. The individual orbits do vary over very long periods of time, but in a more or less regular basis that just goes back and forth around the median of the orbits. For an example, see how the orbit of Mars is affected by Jupiter on my website, at https://cseligman.com/text/planets/marsoppositions.htm . As the illustration near the bottom of the page shows, the eccentricity of the orbit varies by about 6% from its average value over 2 million year time period, but that change just repeats over and over and is completely unaffected by any of the other planets, because they are much smaller than Jupiter and much farther from Mars. For the Earth, because we're even further from Jupiter, changes in our orbit, although they also go back and forth a bit, only change by about 1/3 as much.

As the director of a public observatory, I am concerned about the negative effect of such events, the importance, rarity, and/or visual impact of which is routinely grossly exaggerated by the "clickbait media." Specifically, when people have been misled to believe that it is something more than it really is, they are being set up for disappointment, the blow-back of which may be for them to distrust the media, and possibly astronomy (and astronomers) by association, no matter how hard the latter try to temper expectations. Every such event may be a teachable moment, but it's hard to teach effectively when your voice is drowned out by a cacophony of misinformation.