Planetary alignments have no effects, they just look nice.
nothing would happen
It isn't called anything because it can never occur. It never has occurred in the past, and never will occur in the future. Even if all the planets were at the same heliocentric longitude relative to the Sun, the tilts of their orbits vary enough from the plane of the ecliptic that they still wouldn't be in line.Another, more accurate, answerThink of a very simple alignment of two planets, Earth and Venus. This only occurs a little more than once a century. To add a third planet to this alignment would take many millennia. To have all eight planets aligned would require an infinite amount of time.Even so, the word for it is syzygy.
The next syzygy, when the Earth, Sun, and Moon align, will occur during a new moon or full moon phase. These alignments happen roughly every 29.5 days, so the next syzygy will be around that timeframe.
This is when the earth, sun, and the center of the galaxy are all lined up. Some folks claim that galactic alignment will cause bad things to happen, but that's nonsense because this alignment happens every year around mid-December.
If you are talking about all the planets being in a straight line, you are talking about an event that almost never happens. Several hundred millions of years goes by between these events. The probability is even lower if you want the alignment to include the sun. Trillions of years would separate such events. There are alignments of various kinds, but you need to define what you mean by 'full'. See link for more information.
nothing would happen
A planetary alignment should not have any significant influence on such an event, one way or the other.
You can get a back miss alignment. Or to put it another way you could get bent out of shape. That is were a chiropractor comes in.
It isn't called anything because it can never occur. It never has occurred in the past, and never will occur in the future. Even if all the planets were at the same heliocentric longitude relative to the Sun, the tilts of their orbits vary enough from the plane of the ecliptic that they still wouldn't be in line.Another, more accurate, answerThink of a very simple alignment of two planets, Earth and Venus. This only occurs a little more than once a century. To add a third planet to this alignment would take many millennia. To have all eight planets aligned would require an infinite amount of time.Even so, the word for it is syzygy.
This event is known as a Great Conjunction, where the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn align roughly every 20 years. However, a planetary alignment involving all the planets is a rare occurrence and may not happen exactly every 100 years.
The alignment of all planets would result in freak weather, planetary oscilllation (wobbling on their axis) and the apocalypse. However few planets are perfectly on the eccliptic so could not be properly algined.
The last time the planets aligned in a straight line while revolving around the sun was on March 20, 1345. This phenomenon, known as a planetary alignment, occurs when several planets appear in a line relative to the sun from the perspective of Earth.
There are no planetary alignments, ever. All the planets NEVER all line up in a row. On very rare occasions, they sometimes get "sort of close", but the next one of these is several thousand years in the future. Nothing particularly bad is going to happen in 2012, especially as compared to the December 26 2004 magnitude 9.2 earthquake in Sumatram and the resulting tsunami that killed 250,000 people, or the 9.0 earthquake of March 11, 2011 (and resulting tsunami) in Japan that has killed probably 20,000 dead and missing, or any of the other NATURAL DISASTERS which happen all too frequently - and which always have.
Lunar eclipses can happen a maximum of twice per year, and only at the time of the full moon. Sometimes the alignment is just right, and we get a total lunar eclipse. If the alignment isn't exact, we might get a partial or a penumbral eclipse instead of a total eclipse.
The next syzygy, when the Earth, Sun, and Moon align, will occur during a new moon or full moon phase. These alignments happen roughly every 29.5 days, so the next syzygy will be around that timeframe.
It depends on where you live but if you happen to live near the Greater Toronto Area, West End alignment and Auto repair is a great place to go to. Of course, you can always fix it on your own.
As of August 2014, there is not another Civil war about to happen in the US.