November 2025
The Sky Tonight - November 2025
November continues the season of Kambarang, marked by the colourful appearance of plants and animals as spring …
ExploreFull Moon
December 5
You have reached the main content region of the page.
The casual observer
December signals the arrival of Birak, marking the transition into noticeably warmer weather. Represented by the colour red, Birak is all about heat, Sun and fire! As the temperature climbs, the skies clear and the evenings grow longer and warmer, providing perfect conditions for stargazing.
The Milky Way remains low along the western horizon and a little tricky to see this month, but there’s still plenty to enjoy in the sky. As Scorpius sets in the west, Orion the Hunter rises in the east, signalling that it’s now Orion’s time in the spotlight.
Image: Orion dominates the eastern sky during December evenings. Credit: Stellarium
This month we are treated to the Geminids Meteor Shower, one of the year’s most spectacular and reliable meteor showers. The Geminids will be visible for much of the month and are at their peak around December 14th. Known for their bright, colourful meteors, the Geminids can produce 40–50 meteors per hour under dark skies — a dazzling show for night-sky watchers! Best viewed after midnight, looking toward Gemini in the north. You can use the bright Jupiter as a guide as well.
Image: Gemini and the Geminids, with Jupiter for reference. Credit: Stellarium
Meteor showers are the result of debris from space burning up in Earth’s atmosphere. Most of this debris is left behind when comets streak into our inner solar system, leaving behind a trail of ice and dust. Unlike most meteor showers however, which originate from comets, the Geminids come from an asteroid named 3200 Phaethon, not a comet. As the Earth passes through the debris trail left by Phaethon, tiny dust particles burn up in our atmosphere, creating brilliant streaks of light.
The Summer Solstice occurs on December 21 and marks the astronomical beginning of summer in the southern hemisphere. On this day, the southern hemisphere experiences its longest day and shortest night of the year as the Sun reaches its most southerly point, directly over the Tropic of Capricorn (23.4°S).
On December 25 we celebrate the birth of the most significant thinker in history, Isaac Newton.
ISS sightings from Perth
The International Space Station passes overhead multiple times a day. Most of these passes are too faint to see but a couple of notable sightings* are:
| Date, time | Appears | Max Height | Disappears | Magnitude | Duration |
| 6 Dec 8:07 PM | 10° above NNW | 32° | 10° above ESE | -3.1 | 5.5 min |
| 8 Dec 8:06 PM | 10° above NW | 64° | 10° above SE | -3.3 | 6.5 min |
Table: Times and dates to spot the ISS from Perth
Source: Heavens above, Spot the Station
*Note: These predictions are only accurate a few days in advance. Check the sources linked for more precise predictions on the day of your observations.
Dates of interest
-
Super Full Moon
December 5
-
Summer Solstice
December 21
-
Isaac Newton’s birthday
December 25
Planets to look for
Mercury appears in the eastern sky before sunrise for the early birds this month. Meanwhile, Mars and Venus are lost in the glare of the Sun this month and can’t be seen.
Saturn is nicely visible in the northwestern sky during the early evenings.
Jupiter is the highlight this month, rising about 10pm and visible across the northern skies until sunrise as a bright white point. It is joined by the Moon on December 8 for a nice encounter and definitely worth going out for.
Image: Jupiter and the Moon as seen on December 8. Credit: Stellarium
Constellation of the month
Pisces – The Fish
Pisces is a large, faint constellation visible in the northwest during December evenings. It appears as a V-shaped pattern of stars stretching gracefully across the sky and is best viewed just after sunset.
Image: Pisces, the fish, with Saturn nearby. Credit: Stellarium
Pisces represents two fish tied together by a cord, a symbol that has been recognised for thousands of years. In Greek mythology, the fish are said to be Aphrodite and her son Eros, who transformed into fish to escape the monster Typhon. To ensure they would not lose each other, they tied themselves together with a long ribbon.
The brightest star in the constellation Alpha Piscium shines at a relatively dim magnitude 3.62, making this a challenging constellation to observe for the keen naked eye observer.
Pisces is home to the galaxy Messier 74, a target of interest for professional and amateur astronomers. With its clearly defined blue spiral arms coiling from a dense yellowish core, M74 demonstrates a perfect textbook grand design spiral galaxy.
Image: M74 as imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope. Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, R. Chandar
The Milky Way is known to be a spiral galaxy, but with a bar structure running through the middle. Studying galaxies like M74 allows astronomers to better understand how galaxies form spiral arms and how different shapes of galaxies across the universe are related to each other.
Curious astronomers used the James Webb Space Telescope to image M74, which revealed filaments of gas and dust in the bright spiral arms. It is generally understood that spiral galaxies form new stars in the spiral arms by compressing these clouds of gas to form new stars. Bursts of star formation often produce many hot stars – and hot stars are blue – giving the characteristic blue appeance to the arms of spiral galaxies.
Image: The James Webb Space Telescope reveals clouds of gas that closely follow the pattern of the spiral arms shown in the Hubble image above. Credit: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, J. Lee and the PHANGS-JWST Team.
Object for the small telescope
Neptune
The eighth planet in the Solar System is located in Pisces this month. At a magnitude of about 7.8 throughout December, this faint planet will make for a challenging target for the keen observer. Currently it is sitting about 5 degrees away from Saturn which makes for a good reference point. Through a decent telescope it should appear as a small blue point or disk.
Image: Neptune and Saturn in the December sky separated by about 5 degrees, with the boundary of Pisces shown in red. Credit: Stellarium.
EscaPADE sort of goes to Mars, New Glenn bolts it.
On November 13, the Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamic Explorers (EscaPADE) mission launched to space on the New Glenn rocket provided by Blue Origin. That’s quite a sentence so let’s unpack it piece by piece.
EscaPADE is a NASA mission consisting of two identical spacecraft, about a metre in size, named Blue and Gold, whose purpose is to study the magnetic and plasma environment around Mars. Scientists want to know how Mars’s magnetic field interacts with the solar wind – the constant stream of high energy charged particles that emanates from the Sun – and how this interaction affects Mars’s atmosphere.
Unlike on Earth, where our planet’s strong magnetic field comfortably deflects most of the solar wind safely around us, the weak and inconsistent Martian magnetic field is nowhere near as effective, allowing the solar wind to interact much more strongly with the atmosphere of Mars and, over millions of years, strip it away from the planet.
Image: Mars’s magnetic field and atmosphere interact with the solar wind in a complex way. Credit: NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio. Image of Martian magnetic field line interactions courtesy of Anil Rao/Univ. of Colorado/MAVEN/NASA GSFC
Ultimately, the goal is to understand more about the puzzling history of Mars and its water. As a result of billions of years of exposure to the solar wind, Mars as we know it today has an extremely tenuous atmosphere, 150 times thinner than Earth. Consequently, the air pressure is so low that liquid water can’t exist on the surface of the planet – it just immediately evaporates away or freezes, or both.
There are no rivers or lakes on Mars today. However, the extensive presence of sedimentary rocks and clay minerals – things that can only form in bodies of liquid water – tells us the planet used to have great bodies of water on its surface. This means the atmosphere of Mars in the distant past was once much thicker and at a high enough pressure to be able to support liquid water. Thus, the need to understand how Mars lost its atmosphere.
Image: Sedimentary rocks on Mars photographed by the Perseverance Rover. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Blue and Gold are both equipped with magnetometers to measure the magnetic field strength around Mars, as well as instruments that measure the energy and density of ions and plasma around the planet.
After an 11-month flight to Mars the two spacecraft will operate a year-long science mission collecting data around the planet. Cleverly, the spacecraft will spend six months orbiting Mars in the same orbit, allowing them both to collect measurements from the same part of the magnetosphere, and then they will each shift to different orbits, allowing for measurements of different and distant parts of the magnetosphere at the same time.
Image: Artistic impression of the identical Blue and Gold spacecraft. Credit: Rocket Lab.
That’s the plan anyway. The spacecraft were supposed to be launched in October 2024 but were delayed by the late development of the New Glenn rocket. Because Earth and Mars are always moving, there are only certain times of year you can launch a spacecraft between them, called a launch window.
November 2025 is not an open launch window between Earth and Mars, but the looming threat of budget cuts potentially cancelling the program altogether forced NASA’s hand to launch the spacecraft now. They will hang around at a point about 1.5 million km from Earth called L2 until late 2026 when the window to Mars opens and they will be on their way, if they are still operational. If only politics were as easy as interplanetary space travel.
The flight was exciting as the second test flight of the shiny new New Glenn rocket from Blue Origin. Blue Origin – owned by Jeff Bezos – is an aerospace company mostly known for their space tourism flights on the New Shepard rocket. You know, the one that is shaped like an aubergine.
Image: New Shepard in flight. Credit: Blue Origin
Meanwhile, for the past decade or so, they have quietly (and somewhat secretively) been developing the New Glenn, the much, much, much bigger sibling of New Shepard. Where New Shepard is a tiny rocket, ‘only’ 18 metres tall, that launches tourists 100km straight up and down, New Glenn is a 100-metre-tall heavy lift vehicle designed to haul satellites and spacecraft into Earth’s orbit and beyond.
Image: New Glenn (right) compared to the SpaceX Falcon Heavy (middle) and the New Shepard booster (left). Credit: Everyday Astronaut
At seven metres in diameter and capable of launching 45 tonnes of cargo into Low Earth Orbit, New Glenn was comically overpowered for the 2 x 500kg spacecraft of EscaPADE.
The rocket is designed to be partially reuseable, with the first stage booster separating and landing under its own thrust on a barge in the middle of the ocean, exactly like the SpaceX Falcon 9. Meanwhile the second stage continues to orbit to deploy the cargo before deorbiting and burning up in the atmosphere so as not to create more space junk.
During New Glenn’s maiden flight in January 2025 the booster exploded in the atmosphere while attempting to land. After tweaking and modifying the second flight booster and trajectory, Blue Origin was ready to try again. Did they succeed? You should really watch this summary of the launch:
Video: New Glenn becomes the second orbital class rocket to propulsively land.
Interestingly, moments after successfully landing, the New Glenn booster fired explosive bolts from its landing legs to secure itself to the barge.
Image: New Glenn securing itself to the barge. Credit: Blue Origin
The reason for this is the sheer size of the rocket, something usually lost in camera angles like this, combined with the fact that it still has several tonnes of fuel on board. The last thing you want after sending your billion-dollar rocket to space and back is for it to literally fall over on the last hurdle. Rockets that fall over always end badly (and look awesome!), hence the need to bolt it down.
To truly get a scale for how big this thing is, here’s some people for comparison:
Image: Workers inspect the New Glenn booster after landing. Credit: Jeff Bezos/Blue Origin.
The successful landing, and eventually, reuse of the New Glenn booster will allow Blue Origin to be more competitive in the commercial satellite launch market, a market currently dominated by SpaceX. If all goes well there will be more New Glenn booster landings in the future.
In case you’re wondering…
The New Shepard and New Glenn get their namesakes from American astronauts. Alan Shepard was the first US citizen to go to space. His flight on the Freedom 7 spacecraft launched straight up and down, just like the New Shepard does today. John Glenn was the first US citizen to orbit Earth on the Friendship 7 spacecraft, as New Glenn is designed to do.
