Planets in line and the ecliptic

This was taken on Tuesday morning. The Moon has since disappeared but as well as Venus along the diagonal line with the Moon in the photo, I was able to pick out Mars and Jupiter this morning. They are all in a line because they are all in the same plane in orbit around the Sun. The dust and ice from which the planets formed was pulled into a single plane as the Sun rotated in its formation. The line up in the sky is called the ecliptic. So why do I see them along a line at 50 degrees to the horizontal and not along a nice horizontal line? In part, it's because the Earth doesn't sit properly upright. It is at an angle of 23 degrees to the ecliptic. I then tried to work out how much of the rest is because of the latitude. Wigton is about 54 degrees north so we are standing at an angle to outer space! The 3D geometry is beyond me tonight.