Bakersfield Night Sky — December 6, 2025
It is now Finals week at Bakersfield College. The William M Thomas Planetarium will present the holiday show “Season of Light” on Thursday, December 11 and then close down for the winter break.
Tonight, the waning gibbous moon will be near Jupiter and Gemini’s brightest star, Pollux, to form an isosceles triangle with Pollux at the top vertex as they rise in the east at about 8 p.m. As the night progresses, the moon will draw closer to Jupiter and by an hour before sunrise tomorrow morning, the triangle will have shrunk considerably with the moon almost in between Jupiter and Pollux. The triangle will again be an isosceles but the moon will now be at the top vertex and you’ll be able to fit either the moon and Jupiter or the moon and Pollux within the same field of view of your binoculars.
A week later on the night of December 13/14, Gemini will again be the center of attention with the peak of the Geminid meteor shower. The Geminids are usually the strongest meteor shower of the year with meteors rates of over 130 per hour on a dark sky far from the city. In Bakersfield we could see about half that but still a very impressive 50 to 70 per hour. The moon will be at waning crescent, only 30% lit, and not rise until a little after 2 a.m.
The Geminids are formed from Earth plowing through the dust trail left behind by the once-active comet 3200 Phaethon (now considered an asteroid). The Geminids are among the slowest moving meteors of the year, streaking through the atmosphere at only 22 miles/second. The radiant, from which the meteors appear to come, will be just a little to the right of Gemini’s second brightest star, Castor, on the night of the peak. The longer streaks will more likely be about 80-90 degrees away from the radiant, so look toward Aries or Pisces below the Great Square of Pegasus. The stars of Pisces are probably too dim to see from Bakersfield but we can see the brighter stars of Pegasus, even with the glare of the street and business lights.
You’ll want to be facing that direction or even further west after 2 a.m. to have the rising moon at your back. If you do want to look at the moon in the early morning of December 14, you’ll see it really close to the brightest star of Virgo, Spica, in the east. They’ll be just a couple of knuckles at arm’s length apart from each other and get closer as we approach sunrise.
In space research news, we’ve finally detected lightning on Mars but it wasn’t by seeing flashes of light. NASA’s Perseverance rover has a microphone onboard to characterize winds and atmospheric turbulence. Researchers, re-analyzing the recording made when a dust devil passed directly over Perseverance in September 2021 (yes, 4 years ago), found a clapping sound. The electrostatic sparks occur when airborne dust grains collide with each other. The most energetic of the sparks are comparable to the energy of a car’s spark plug. The sparks produce electromagnetic interference shortly before the clapping, which is the martian analogue of seeing lightning before hearing the thunder.
Mars’ mini-lightning doesn’t travel far because of Mars’ very thin atmosphere (surface air pressure is less than 1% of Earth’s at sea level) and the high percentage of carbon dioxide. On the other hand, the same conditions create a much lower threshold to produce the sparks than on Earth, a threshold 200X lower than on Earth.
The sparks help form the hydrogen peroxide and perchlorate salts that are responsible for destroying organic molecules at the surface. Any microbes or microbial remains from past life will only exist buried down deep in the soil away from the surface disinfectants. The sparks may explain why the other NASA rover, Curiosity, has detected whiffs of methane at the surface while ESA’s Trace Gas Orbiter satellite has failed to find any methane in the atmosphere. The sparks might damage sensitive equipment sent to Mars in the future that isn’t properly shielded and the sparks might play a role in helping get the dust airborne and moving to create the large dust storms that sometimes engulf the entire planet. Beware future astronauts!
In other space exploration news, the Europeans are significantly boosting their funding of the European Space Agency’s science missions as the United States severely cuts back on its own funding. The funding boost will be directed toward an x-ray observatory that’ll replace the aging U.S. ones and a mission to Saturn’s moon Enceladus. Enceladus is a small moon with great astrobiology possibilities because it very likely has an ocean of liquid water below its icy crust. Europe is pulling back from funding joint projects with NASA (the Artemis and Lunar Gateway missions and the Mars Sample Return) because of the great uncertainties of NASA funding. We’ll also probably see China pull ahead of the U.S. as well in the coming years but they’re quite a bit more secretive about their plans.
I hope you’ll enjoy more star gazing in the longer nights of December!
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Director of the William M Thomas Planetarium at Bakersfield College
Author of the award-winning website www.astronomynotes.com
