Bakersfield Night Sky — September 6, 2025
Now past Labor Day, the fall semester at BC is in full swing. Yesterday, (Friday, September 5), began the fall season of shows at the William M Thomas Planetarium with “Mesmerica”. That repeats this evening. Tickets are on sale for the September 25 show “From Earth to the Universe”.
Tonight and tomorrow night the moon will be at nearly the same full moon phase. At 11:09 a.m. Pacific time on September 7, the moon will be directly lined up with Earth and the sun, so the moon will pass through Earth’s shadow to make a lunar eclipse. Unfortunately for us in the western hemisphere, the moon will still be below the horizon and not rise for several hours later. Those in eastern Africa, the Middle East, most of Asia, and western Australia will be able to experience at least some part of the total lunar eclipse.
The following evening, September 8 will see the waning gibbous moon rising with Saturn becoming visible in the east by about 8:15 p.m. They will be among the dim stars of Pisces below the Great Square of Pegasus. A few nights later on September 12 a much skinnier waning gibbous moon will be next to the Pleiades at the shoulder of Taurus. Both of them will be visible rising in the east by 10:45 p.m. The moon will be about half a fist at arm’s length to the lower left of the Pleiades as they rise and move to a full fist width separation by the time of sunrise on September 13.
On the evening of September 13 you may be able to spot the bright star, blue-white Spica of Virgo and orange-red Mars huddled closely together low in the west-southwest just after sunset. With the Bakersfield haze, you’ll probably need binoculars to pick them out and they’ll both fit within the same field of view of the binoculars.
A better view will be from Sequoia National Park at the 2025 Dark Sky Festival taking place from September 12 to 14. The Kern Astronomical Society will have their telescopes pointing at various objects on the night of September 13 at Wuksachi Lodge back parking lot. During the day will be various astronomy/space exploration-related presentations and family events. The Dark Sky Festival itself is free but there will be the normal park entrance fee. The attached star chart above shows the sky for September 13 looking high toward the southeast. With the dark sky at Sequoia, you’ll be able to see the hazy band of the Milky Way and how it gets thicker in the Sagittarius/Scorpius direction because we’re looking toward the central bulge of our home galaxy.
The moon’s next nice pairing will be on the pre-dawn morning of September 16, though this will actually be sort of a “double-pairing” since it’ll make an isosceles triangle with Jupiter and the bright star Pollux in Gemini. The trio will become visible in the east by 2 a.m. with Pollux the lower-left corner, the waning crescent moon at the top middle point, and very bright Jupiter at the lower-right corner. Three mornings later on September 19, a very thin crescent moon will be right next Regulus and Venus as they rise in the east just before 5 a.m. Sharp eyes will be able to separate all three but because they are so close to each other, some folks might need binoculars to split them apart. Whether or not you need binoculars, the view will be spectacular with them! This will also be the closest pairing of Venus and the moon all year and having the moon be such a thin sliver of a crescent makes it an even more beautiful sight.
Saturn has been getting brighter and brighter as it heads for opposition, being directly opposite the sun on our sky. This occurs on the night of September 20/21. However, its rings will be nearly edge-on so this opposition will be a bit more muted than other oppositions. It’ll reach magnitude 0.58, making it the third brightest “star” in the early evening sky.
In space exploration news, an international team of astronomers led by Richelle van Capelleveen of the Leiden Observatory in The Netherlands published a beautiful first-ever image of a baby planet orbiting in the gap it has cleared out around the young star. The 5-million-year-old star has a catchy name of TYC 5709-354-1 (just rolls off the tongue) and is 430 light years away. While we have imaged multiple rings of protoplanetary disks around other young stars before and we have seen in another system a young planet in the empty central region of the disk around its star, this is the first time we’ve seen a young planet in the gap that the planet itself has made.
Capelleveen’s team used the Very Large Telescope of the European Southern Observatory in Chile to image the forming system. They followed the planet over an 18-month period. The baby planet was imaged as part of the “Wide-Separation Planets in Time” survey, so the planet has been named “WISPIT-2b” which is a bit easier to pronounce than the star. WISPIT-2b is about 5 times the mass of Jupiter and orbits at 57 AU from the star. For comparison, Neptune orbits at 30 AU and Pluto orbits at 39.5 AU from the sun. Observations with the Magellan Telescope in Chile by Laird Close of the University of Arizona show that the baby planet continues to suck up hydrogen gas from the surrounding disk.
Hope to see you at one of the Planetarium shows!
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Director of the William M Thomas Planetarium at Bakersfield College
Author of the award-winning website www.astronomynotes.com
