Bakersfield Night Sky — November 15, 2025
Tickets are still available for this Thursday’s (November 20) showing of “Incoming!” at the William M Thomas Planetarium. On Friday (November 21) tickets will go on sale for the winter show that is a holiday tradition for many families, “Season of Light” showing on the first two Thursdays in December—after Thanksgiving. The show “Incoming!” describes the history of asteroid and comet impacts on Earth, how they have changed the course of life on Earth and how studying them up close could help us prevent future impacts as well as what we can learn about our cosmic origins. Links to the ticket sites for the regular Planetarium shows and for Mesmerica (showing on December 5 & 6) are posted on the William M Thomas Planetarium’s Shows page .
Monday morning, November 17, is the peak of the Leonid meteor shower that usually puts on a good show of 10-15 meteors per hour and this year will be especially nice since the moon will be a very thin waning crescent, just three days from new phase. The Leonids get their name from the location of the radiant they appear to streak from—the middle of the Sickle part of Leo that forms the head and chest of the lion with bright Regulus at the end. The Leonids radiate out from that location as Earth plows through the dust trail left behind by Comet 55P/Tempel-Tuttle. They are the fastest of the major meteor showers. The dust bits hit our atmosphere at 44 miles/second (!), burning up many tens of miles above the surface (thankfully!).
The star chart above shows the sky at 5 a.m. when the Leonids should be going strong and just before the first stage of morning twilight begins—astronomical twilight. The view is centered on the brilliant planet, Jupiter to the left of the Pollux side of Gemini. Jupiter becomes first visible rising in the east at about 9:20 p.m., so at 5 a.m., this view is looking southwest. Leo will be almost due south by then. The dim stars of Cancer are between the brighter stars of Gemini and Leo. Just the stick figure for Cancer with just one small dot at the south end for the star called Tarf, an orange-warm red giant star a little over 300 light years away. Pollux in Gemini is also a giant star, slightly warmer than Tarf but its much closer distance of just 34 light years makes it appear much brighter in our sky.
To the right of Gemini is Auriga, the charioteer with the very bright star Capella, 43 light years away. Capella is actually a quadruple star system made of two binary systems orbiting each other. Most of the light we see is produced by one of the binaries. Two yellow giants orbit each other every 104 days at about the same distance as Venus orbits the sun. Both stars put out between 70 and 80 times as much energy as the sun. The second binary system is made of much smaller and cooler red dwarf stars but their orbits around each other are poorly known with period estimates ranging between 300 and 388 years. The red dwarf pair orbit the yellow giant pair at a distance of about 250 times Pluto’s orbit size. Auriga is usually drawn as a pentagon with Capella at one point and the tip of Taurus’ horn at the opposite end but sometimes another side is added as my star chart software does. The additional side connects to one of the three stars to the lower right of Capella, called “the Kids” because Auriga is holding one or more baby goats in his lap. (Now, I think holding the goats while driving a chariot would be a bit difficult but perhaps it’s easier to do up in the heavens.)
Below Auriga is Taurus with the orange giant star Aldebaran (67 light years away) at the eye of the bull and the beautiful Pleiades star cluster at its shoulder. Taurus is charging the bright winter constellation Orion with the supergiant stars, red Betelgeuse and blue-white Rigel at opposite ends. Though they are several hundred light years away, they still appear bright in our sky because they are many tens of thousands of times more luminous than the sun. To the left of Orion are his hunting dogs, Canis Major and Canis Minor. Their bright stars, Sirius and Procyon, are regular stars just a bit hotter than the sun and very close by with distances of just 8.6 light years and 11.5 light years, respectively.
While you’re up watching the meteors that early pre-dawn morning, you’ll see the waning crescent moon next to the brightest star of Virgo, Spica, rising in the east at about 4:30 a.m.. The following morning, an even thinner crescent, just 3% lit, will be near the Morning Star, brilliant Venus. They’ll be a little less than a fist width at arm’s length apart from each other. On the morning of November 25, you might be able to see Mercury just above Venus but it’ll require binoculars to see, since they are so close to the horizon in the dawn twilight. They will easily fit within the same field of view of the binoculars, though, so find Venus and then look just above it for Mercury. Mercury is heading for its best morning appearance on December 6, when it will be ten degrees above the horizon a half hour before sunrise.
—
Director of the William M Thomas Planetarium at Bakersfield College
Author of the award-winning website www.astronomynotes.com
