Bakersfield Night Sky — August 23, 2025
Bakersfield College’s fall semester begins on Monday with increased enrollments as more students find out what a great value BC provides. Bakersfield College hasn’t changed its tuition for the past 13 years—community colleges in our bordering states are now charging at least 2.5 times more than the California Community Colleges and four-year schools are at least 18 times more.
With the fall semester comes a new schedule of shows at the William M Thomas Planetarium, beginning with the popular Mesmerica shows on the first Friday+Saturday evenings of the month and the selected Thursday evening star tours with all-dome science films. The first Thursday evening show is “From Earth to the Universe” on September 25. The entire fall schedule is posted on the Planetarium’s website.
For the first part of August, the sights to see in the sky were for the early risers. In this last week of August, the sight to check out is in the early evening. On Tuesday evening, August 26, Mars, the moon, and Virgo’s brightest star, Spica, will be gathered together in the west-southwest. They’ll make a triangle with a thin sliver waxing crescent moon at the bottom point and the other two points about equidistant from the moon, with blue-white Spica to the upper left and orange-red Mars to the upper right. The moon will thicken to a half-lit first quarter phase by the end of the month.
In the south will be Scorpius with bright Antares at its heart and the “Teapot” part of Sagittarius right next to where the milky band of the Milky Way is thickest—the galactic bulge. That’s downtown Milky Way, so you’ll find a number of star clusters and nebulae in that general direction.
The NISAR satellite that I talked about in my previous column unfurled its 39-foot drum-shaped antenna reflector last week. NISAR uses a synthetic aperture radar process to achieve an equivalent resolution in the radio L-band wavelengths of a traditional system that would be 12 miles long (just a bit too large to fit on a rocket). By detecting the movement of land and ice surfaces down to one centimeter, NISAR will help us understand processes in natural hazards such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and landslides; weather disasters such as hurricanes, storm surges, and flooding; changes in ice sheets, glaciers, and sea ices; and how deforestation, permafrost loss, and fires affect the cycling of carbon in Earth’s climate.
Another couple of already-deployed and healthy Earth-science missions are facing termination for unstated reasons. The Orbiting Carbon Observatories were originally designed to measure carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The climate connection is probably why the OCOs may be terminated, even if Congress continues funding them. However, after the OCOs were launched, we accidentally discovered that the OCOs were also able to measure plant growth. It turns out that while plants are photosynthesizing, they give off a very specific wavelength of light that the OCOs can measure. This “happy accident” has provided valuable data to the US Department of Agriculture and private agricultural consulting companies to forecast and track crop yield, drought conditions, and even help predict future political instabilities due to crop failures. The cost to keep the OCOs running is just two percent or less of what was spent to design, build and launch them (back in 2014 and 2019), so it makes more financial sense to keep running a system that measures our food supply than to throw it away and blind ourselves.
A couple of exoplanet discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope were announced in the past few weeks. Most recently, Webb has ruled out an atmosphere existing around the third planet of the nearby TRAPPIST-1 system of seven planets. Webb had already shown that the innermost two planets were bare. Webb will now look at the next three planets, ones that lie within the star’s habitable zone (comfortable temperature zone for liquid water to exist on a planet’s surface). TRAPPIST-1 is only 40 light years away.
Much closer is the Alpha Centauri system at just 4.3 light years away. This system is made of three stars: two close-orbiting ones that are warm like the sun and a third small, cool red-dwarf that orbits both of them at a large distance. That third star, Proxima Centauri, is currently positioned between us and the other two (hence the “Proxima” in its name) and we know it has three planets orbiting it.
Webb may have imaged a planet orbiting the hottest and brightest of the two other stars (Alpha Centauri A or ACenA). Alpha Centauri A is nearly identical to the sun in terms of temperature and luminosity while its nearby companion, Alpha Centauri B is a bit cooler and dimmer. Alpha Centauri A emits over 90% of the total combined light of the system. Using a coronagraph, Webb blocked the light from ACenA and then a software canceling of ACenB’s light brought out the faint glow of ACenA’s planet.
Maybe. A couple of follow-up observations failed to image the exoplanet. However, it is quite possible that the exoplanet’s orbit has moved it too close to ACenA, so the planet is blocked by the coronagraph. Continued observations with Webb and then the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope, which launches in 2027, will hopefully find it.
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Director of the William M Thomas Planetarium at Bakersfield College
Author of the award-winning website www.astronomynotes.com
