Starting Saturday evening, you’ll be able to see not one, two or three planets in the night sky, but four. The graphic you see shows the moon's trajectory through the night sky. This means at its peak,

You won't see a majestic line of planets on Jan. 25 the way people on social media promise, but you will see four bright planets starting Jan. 16.

However, while no such events took place on that date, nor on his revised date of Dec. 25, 1919, the seeds of anxiety and fear of planetary alignments were already planted in the collective human psyche, only to sprout again and again in the decades that followed.