By now you would have come across this photo, showing a planetary alignment over the Giza Pyramids, saying this only happens once every 2737 years.
The image shows three planets perfectly aligned with the Pyramids.
However we would like to burst the bubble of your excitement if you thought this image was real. This is a HOAX!
The image was created in 2012 and published online by Charles Marcello on World Mysteries Blog. Marcello used the free software Stellarium to create the image.
So, when the event happened, did the planets really look like that in the sky as seen from Giza?
Phil Plait from blogs.discovermagazine.com, who rubbished the claim immediately, then came up with this answer:
The answer is no. I used the software planetarium program SkySafari to show what the three planets would look like in the sky before sunrise on December 3rd as seen from the location of the pyramids, and got this:
In this picture, the yellow line is the ecliptic, the path of the Sun in the sky through the year. The green horizontal line is the horizon, and the three planets are labeled.
Note the angle of the planets: in the picture going viral, the planets are much closer to horizontal, but in reality the line connecting the planets is at a muchsteeper angle. It’s nearly vertical, in fact. This may not seem like a big deal, but having the planets closer to horizontal like in the viral picture is more spectacular than what will really happen, exaggerating the claim.
Not only that, but in the pyramid picture the planets are almost exactly on a line, like beads on a string. But as you can see in the picture above, they’re not nearly that colinear. Again it’s looking like the pyramid picture is exaggerating the situation.
Bottomline, don’t just blindly believe everything you read on the internet.
&uuid=(email))