Bakersfield Night Sky — November 7, 2026
In a couple of weeks (on November 19), I’ll show “How Big? How Far?” at the William M Thomas Planetarium. I created the show to try to give a sense of the scale of things in our solar system and how our solar system compares to surrounding stars and the Galaxy. When distances in our solar system are measured in millions, even billions, of miles, how does one do that in a way that we can grasp?
When dealing with numbers that large, we often don’t try to understand what the large numbers mean at a gut level and just consider them as a mental exercise of adding on zeroes to the end of an already long string of zeroes. One way to get a handle on the large distances is to use a scale model. At the beginning of every semester, I take my students on a walk of the solar system. Using a small nerf basketball about 6.5 inches in diameter to represent the sun, I pace out the distances and use small grains of sand for the sizes of the terrestrial (inner four) planets of Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars, and a dime for Jupiter, a button for Saturn, and smaller circles for Uranus and Neptune. I include dwarf planet Pluto in the tour for sentimental reasons (a tiny almost microscopic dot), though today’s students don’t have as strong an emotional attachment to Pluto as students did a decade or so ago. Sigh!
On the Bakersfield College Panorama campus, we walk from the Planetarium to just shy of the GET bus terminal at Panorama Drive and that’s only to Uranus. Neptune and Pluto would be beyond the bluff edge, so somewhere in Panorama Vista Preserve. If the Bakersfield College Panorama campus is (most of) the solar system, then the next star system, Alpha Centauri would be another school campus all the way across the country and beyond in Sydney, Nova Scotia, Canada.
Well, that distance might be a little hard to grasp, so I have my students consider a U.S. quarter dollar coin as representing Pluto’s orbit around the sun. On that scale, the next star is about 84 big steps (meters) away. The spacecraft that is farthest from the sun is Voyager 1, launched 49 years ago in 1977. Voyager 1 and its twin Voyager 2 are now in interstellar space, beyond the sun’s magnetic bubble carried by the sun’s solar wind. If Pluto’s orbit is a quarter dollar coin, then Voyager 1 is almost 2.2 quarters from the sun. Continuing with this scale model, our home galaxy, the Milky Way, would fill most of the western U.S., stretching from Los Angeles to Pierre, South Dakota. Planetary systems are truly microscopic compared to galaxies!
Walking out these scale models is not possible to do inside a planetarium, so another way to deal with distances is to consider how much time it would take to travel a given distance. For example, Bakersfield is about two hours away from Los Angeles by car and about 4.5 hours from San Francisco and Sacramento (going uh… reasonable highway speeds). A lot of my family, including my kids, live about 13 hours north of me.
For solar system travel, let’s use our fastest rocket that sent the New Horizons spacecraft on out to Pluto. New Horizons went from Earth to the moon in a little over 8.5 hours. New Horizons took about 9.5 years to travel to Pluto and that was only possible because it got a big gravity boost from Jupiter to shave about 3 years off the travel time. If we didn’t have gravity boosts but the planets were all more-or-less lined up on one side of the solar system, how long would it take to travel from one planet to the other? That is what I show in “How Big? How Far?”
Because the solar system is so tiny compared to interstellar distances, even if we were at Voyager 1’s distance, the constellation star patterns would look the same as what we see on Earth. In “How Big? How Far?” I show the star field as seen from Alpha Centauri. It’s only slightly different, so many of the constellations would still look familiar to us. Tickets are on sale for “How Big? How Far?” Come take a look!
The show will include an evening sky tour with the Chronos star projector. Saturn is the only evening planet up. At sunset, Saturn will be low in the east-southeast among the dim stars of Pisces, below the Great Square of Pegasus. Saturn will be highest due south at 9:25 p.m. The other planets are up in the pre-dawn hours.
The Pleiades at the shoulder of Taurus lead the procession of fall/winter constellations becoming visible by about 5:40 p.m. All of Taurus is fully visible by about two hours after that and Orion is fully visible by about 9:30 p.m. The bright stars Sirius and Procyon in Canis Major and Canis Minor, respectively, rise at about the same time, shortly before 11 p.m.
Mars and Jupiter are close together near the head of Leo with Mars becoming visible a few minutes after midnight and Jupiter about twenty minutes later. They will fit comfortably within the same field of view of your binoculars. On the morning of November 16, they’ll be just a thumb width at arm’s length from each other on the sky. The following night will be the peak of the Leonid meteor shower that always puts on a good show. The moon is at new phase on November 8, so on the night of the Leonids peak, it will be at first quarter phase, setting before midnight. Though the radiant is in Leo, the better view will be more toward Taurus and Pegasus or toward Ursa Minor and Cassiopeia. Venus rises shortly after 5 a.m. as the brilliant “morning star”.
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Director of the William M Thomas Planetarium at Bakersfield College
Author of the award-winning website www.astronomynotes.com
