Bakersfield Night Sky — November 1, 2025
Tickets are still available for the November 6 showing of “Earthquake” and are now selling for “Incoming!” showing on November 20 at the William M Thomas Planetarium. Links to the ticket sites for the regular Planetarium shows and for Mesmerica are posted on the William M Thomas Planetarium’s Shows page .
In this evening’s southeastern sky, you’ll see a bright waxing gibbous moon to the upper right of Saturn. Both of them are at the western edge of Pisces but the dim stars of Pisces require a dark sky outside of the city’s light pollution to see. Higher up in the sky, you should be able to see the brighter stars of the Great Square of Pegasus even with our light pollution. The moon and Saturn will already be up at sunset. They’ll be slightly less than 5 degrees apart (about half a fist at arm’s length), so both should fit in the same field of view of your binoculars. As the night progresses, the gap between them will shrink to about 3.5 degrees.
Mercury and Mars have been very low in the southwest shortly after sunset this past week. Mercury reached its greatest angular separation from the sun on October 29 but it will reach its greatest separation from Mars tomorrow evening (November 2). However by the time civil twilight is finished with the brighter stars beginning to appear at about 6:30 p.m., both of the planets will be 5 degrees or less in altitude and so they will probably be lost in the typical Bakersfield haze layer without binoculars. Mercury is now dropping back down closer to the sun as it swings in between Earth and the sun for inferior conjunction on November 21. On its way down, Mercury will pass by Mars on November 12 but again you’d need binoculars to pick them out from the surrounding twilight glow.
By the time the largest planet in the solar system, Jupiter, becomes visible rising in the east at about 11:20 p.m., most of the Orion group will be up: Orion low in the east, Gemini to the left of Orion, Auriga above Gemini, and Taurus above Orion (see the star chart above). Lepus the hare is below right of Orion. Jupiter is next to the left twin of Gemini (Pollux). The rest of the Orion group, Orion’s hunting dogs, Canis Major and Canis Minor, are visible by about 1:20 a.m. That is just before Daylight Saving Time ends and our clocks take an hour step back (at 2:00 a.m.).
The moon is at full phase the night of November 4/5 and it’ll be in Aries. The following night a waning gibbous moon will be next to the Pleiades star cluster at the shoulder of Taurus. On the night of November 9, an almost third quarter moon will be about 3.5 degrees to the upper left of Jupiter.
Venus rises to the left (east) of the bright star Spica in Virgo becoming visible at about 5:30 a.m. Venus will outshine Spica by a factor of 90. The morning twilight will become too bright to see Spica by about 5:55 a.m.
The most recent issue of Sky and Telescope has an article by Govert Schilling about his travels through the Andes Mountains of Chile to visit some of the largest telescopes in the world that newly opened or are under construction. Astronomers build telescopes on mountains to get above as much of the turbulent atmosphere as possible, so the images are sharper and steadier than what we see down closer to sea level. It is not because they want to get closer to the stars! Being three to four miles closer to a star on a mountaintop is insignificant compared to the distance of even the closest star outside the solar system, 25.7 TRILLION miles away.
The Vera C Rubin Observatory at 8900 foot elevation on Cerro Pachón was one of Schilling’s stops. Using a 3200 megapixel camera with an aperture 8.4 meters across, Rubin will continuously scan the sky every night for 10 years to precisely capture every visible change. It will cover all of the sky visible from its location every 3 to 4 nights to create an ultra wide, ultra-high-definition time-lapse record of the universe. I wrote about Rubin in my June and July columns, so this time I want to focus on the truly enormous telescope being built by the European Southern Observatory (ESO).
On the nearly 10,000 foot Cerro Armozones, ESO is building the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) that will have a primary mirror 39.2 meters (129 feet!) across. When completed in 2029, the ELT will have more light-gathering power than all previous professional research optical telescopes in history combined. The light-gathering power of a telescope depends on the diameter of the primary mirror and it is the most important power of a telescope, though the resolution (resolving power), which also depends on the diameter of the mirror, comes in a close second in importance. The bigger the telescope, the more light it collects, so we can see fainter, more distant, and darker objects.
The ELT mirror will be made of 798 hexagonal segments, each about 1.5 meters wide. To keep the exquisite reflectivity of the aluminum coating, the mirror needs to be re-aluminized every few years. A two-year re-aluminize schedule would mean recoating two segments every day.
As the United States retreats from science with the resulting technological and economic losses that will inevitably come with that retreat, other nations will arise to take the lead.
—
Director of the William M Thomas Planetarium at Bakersfield College
Author of the award-winning website www.astronomynotes.com
