ESA Science & Technology - LASCO Captures Four Planets

This image was taken on 11 November 2006 at 20:42 UT by the LASCO instrument's C3 telescope on board SOHO. LASCO C3 is a coronograph dedicated to observing the Sun's corona and uses an occulting disk to block out direct sunlight, covering the central ~2° of the nearly 16° wide view.

In this image, four planets are seen grouped around the Sun (indicated to scale by the white circle in the centre) with Jupiter and Venus bright enough to cause saturation of the detector resulting in the characteristic bright horizontal streaks.