The Evening Sky in December 2025
Saturn is northwest of the zenith at dusk. It looks like a medium-bright cream-coloured star and sets due west around 1 a.m. The Moon will be below Saturn on the 27th. A small telescope will show the disk of Saturn. The ring is nearly edge-on, so it looks like a spike through the planet. Saturn’s biggest moon, Titan, looks like a star in line with the ring.
Jupiter (not on the chart) rises in the northeast around 11:40 pm at the beginning of the month and around 9:30 at the end. It is the brightest ‘star’ in the late-night sky and shines with a steady golden light. There is an unreliable rule that stars twinkle and planets don’t. It works for Jupiter. Though it isn’t obvious to the eye, Jupiter appears as a disk. This blurs the twinkling effect of the air, giving the steady glow that we see. Jupiter crosses the sky during the night so is in the north to northwest at dawn. Any telescope will show Jupiter’s ‘Galilean’ moons, but not all four every night as they cross in front of and behind Jupiter. Two of the brightest moons can be seen in binoculars, if you can hold them steady enough. The near-full Moon will be near Jupiter on the night of the 7th-8th.
Sirius is the brightest true star, low in the east at dusk, twinkling colourfully. Canopus, the second brightest, is a bit higher in the southeast. Left of Sirius is the constellation of Orion. Bluish Rigel and orange Betelgeuse are Orion’s brightest stars. Between them is the line of three stars making the bottom of 'The Pot' in our southern hemisphere view. A faint line of stars above the bright three is the Pot's handle. At its centre is the Orion Nebula, a glowing gas cloud nicely seen in binoculars.
Left of Orion is a triangular group making the upside-down face of Taurus the bull. Orange Aldebaran, at one tip of the V shape, is one eye of Taurus. The stars on and around the V, except for Aldebaran, are the Hyades cluster. Aldebaran is not a member of the cluster but closer and on the line-of-sight. Further left is the Pleiades/Matariki/Subaru cluster, a tight grouping of six naked-eye stars. Many more stars are seen in binoculars.
Almost overhead is Achernar. It marks the end of Eridanus, the river. The scattered river of faintish stars meanders down the sky to Orion.
Low in the south are the Pointers, Beta and Alpha Centauri, and Crux the Southern Cross, upside down at this time of the year. The Milky Way is wrapped around the horizon. The broadest part is in Sagittarius, low in the southwest at dusk. It narrows toward Crux in the south and becomes faint in the east below Orion. Several star clusters and a glowing gas cloud can be seen in the Milky Way above and left of Crux.
The Clouds of Magellan, LMC and SMC, high in the southern sky, are two small galaxies about 160 000 and 200 000 light-years* away, respectively. They are easily seen by eye on a dark moonless night as misty patches of light. Just right of the SMC, the Small Cloud, is a faint fuzzy ‘star’. It is the globular cluster 47 Tucanae, a globe-shaped cluster of millions of stars.
Very low in the north is the Andromeda Galaxy. In binoculars in a dark sky it looks like a spindle of light. It is a bit bigger than our Milky Way Galaxy and nearly three million light-years away.
Mercury rises in the southeast an hour before the Sun mid-month. The thin crescent Moon will be near it on the mornings of the 18th and 19th
*A light-year (l.y.) is the distance that light travels in one year: nearly 10 million million km, 10^13 km. Sunlight takes eight minutes to get here; moonlight about one second. Sunlight reaches Neptune, the outermost major planet, in four hours. It takes sunlight four years to reach the nearest star, Alpha Centauri.
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