The Moon, Venus, and the Pleiades danced above Sicily in a rare cosmic alignment #NASA #Astronomy

Added: 2026-05-07

[00:00:01]Welcome to NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day for April 29th, 2026, titled The Moon, Venus, >> [music] >> and the Pleiades. No, Earth did not recently acquire six more moons.

[00:00:10]That day's APOD was a combination of images following the Moon, Venus, and the Pleiades [music] across a southern Sicilian sky as twilight turned to evening on April 19th. From 2023 to 2029, the Pleiades and the Moon visited each other once per month due to the [music] Pleiades' location in the ecliptic plane. April 2026 saw the celestial alignment of their visit with Venus.

[00:00:28]About six stars in the Pleiades cluster, Messier 45, were typically visible with the unaided eye.

[00:00:33]Due to the cluster's visibility across the world, there were many myths and legends across cultures associated with the Pleiades.

[00:00:38]>> [music] >> The Haudenosaunee people of North America, for example, said that seven boys danced so enthusiastically that they lifted off into the sky.

[00:00:45]Astronomers recently found thousands more Pleiades members, showing that after thousands of years of gazing upon this cluster, there was yet more to learn about the Pleiades.