Bakersfield Night Sky — January 17, 2026
Bakersfield College’s spring semester begins this week. The spring schedule of regular evening shows at the William M Thomas Planetarium begins with our newest show “Moon Base” on February 19 followed by the ever-popular “Black Holes” on March 5. Tickets are available through the Vallitix site. The Mesmerica shows sold through the Mesmerica site begin on February 6 and 7.
The very bright “star” you see in the eastern sky after sunset is actually the planet Jupiter. It is just coming off opposition when it was directly opposite the sun in our sky as we passed closest to Jupiter, so it is still brighter than its already usual very bright appearance—brighter than any real star in our night sky. The brightest real star is Sirius in the constellation Canis Major. If you’re facing Jupiter in the east between 7 and 9 p.m., Sirius will be much lower in the sky and to the right of Jupiter, i.e., in the southeast.
The orientation I chose for the star chart above is facing the south-southwest to also (barely) include the other giant planet Saturn, which is low in the west-southwest among the dim stars of Pisces below the Great Square of Pegasus. Saturn is at the very right edge of the star chart. The zenith (straight overhead) point is at the top center of the chart. With this orientation, Sirius on the chart appears to be directly below Jupiter, if not a little to the left of Jupiter. Such are the peculiarities of representing a half-dome sky onto a square flat star chart!
As we’ve been passing by Jupiter in our faster, inner orbit, Jupiter has been moving retrograde (backwards) with respect to the stars in Gemini. This is just a matter of our perspective, of course. Jupiter doesn’t really move backwards every now and then. The retrograde motion is an optical illusion that is similar to what you see when you pass slower moving vehicles on the highway and compare their position with respect to the objects in the distance. Earth has the inside faster track and the stars are the background scenery, but, ah!, what a beautiful scenery they are!
Jupiter will be moving retrograde in Gemini until early March. When I did a Google search of Jupiter’s retrograde motion, the AI Overview using various astrology sites as its sources said that Jupiter was in retrograde in the next zodiac constellation over—in Cancer. Well, Jupiter is definitely in Gemini and is below Gemini’s brightest star, Pollux. The Google AI then went on to say that Jupiter would be in retrograde again this year from April to August in Leo. Well, Jupiter won’t actually be closer to Leo than Cancer until the middle of 2027 and Jupiter won’t start retrograde motion again this year until the middle of December and it will be in Cancer, not Leo. If this is an example of the promise of AI, then we’re in real deep trouble as many of the major corporations embed AI throughout their systems but it is a good example of “garbage in, garbage out”! To keep the Google lawyers happy, there is a disclaimer below the AI Overview that says “AI responses may include mistakes.”
The moon is at new phase today, so we’ll begin to see the thin waxing crescent visible low in the southwest by Tuesday or Wednesday (January 20 or 21). A still thin crescent moon will be just to the right of Saturn after sunset on January 22 and the Moon will move closer to Saturn as they set in the west, disappearing in the haze layer by about 9 p.m.
The moon will be at first quarter (looking half lit on the right side) next Sunday, January 25. Two days later, the waxing gibbous moon will be next to the Pleiades star cluster. They will maybe barely fit within the same field of view of your low-power binoculars. On the night of January 30, the almost-full moon will be almost directly between Pollux and Jupiter, so the trio will make a shorter and shorter triangle as the night progresses, being directly lined up by 1 a.m. and then a reversed triangle when they set a bit after 5:30 a.m.
NASA launched a small observatory early last week called Pandora that will study the atmospheres of 20 exoplanets (orbiting other stars) for a year. When an exoplanet passes directly in front of its host star, molecules in the exoplanet’s atmosphere will absorb or scatter the star light passing through the atmosphere in detectable ways that depend on the composition and abundance of the type of molecules. Although the James Webb Space Telescope has looked at 16 of the exoplanets, its detailed view with its huge 6.5-meter mirror was brief and dark sunspots or bright plages on the star could have significantly confused the results, giving us false negative or false positive results.
Pandora has a much smaller half-meter mirror but it will focus on those exoplanets and host stars for a year to tease out the exoplanet atmosphere molecule signals from the stellar activity. Development of Pandora began in 2021 as part of NASA’s Astrophysics Pioneers program that develops, builds, and launches small science satellites at one percent (or less) of the cost of flagship missions like Hubble or Webb and in much less time.
Let’s hope that the small satellite will produce some big results!
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Director of the William M Thomas Planetarium at Bakersfield College
Author of the award-winning website www.astronomynotes.com
