The Full moon, the Yule Moon, is on December 4. This is a supermoon, the second largest of 2025. The next evening, the moon lies just southwest of Jupiter, and just below the Gemini, Pollux above the Moon, and Castor to the west of Jupiter and the Moon. This makes a fine trapezoid in the sky for a photo op with smartphones! The last quarter moon is on December 11. By the peak of the year’s best meteor shower, the Geminids, on the morning of December 14, the moon will be a waning crescent below the star Spica and not interfere with the cosmic fireworks. The thin crescent passes Mercury in the dawn on December 17, and is new on the 19th. December 21 at 9:03 a.m. CST is the shortest day, the Winter Solstice, to mark the most southern point the sun can reach in our sky. From now on, days will gradually get longer, and the Sun higher, but it will probably take two months to convince your body of this. This gap of several weeks between the celestial seasons and nature’s timing is isolation, the fact that the Earth’s oceans and atmosphere store up a lot of heat in our summer, but also take a while to warm back up again in January and February. The moon returns into the evening sky by Christmas, a thin crescent low. It is half lit and the first quarter in the south on December 27.
Mercury lies west of the rising sun in early December, and is visible in the dawn until just after the waning crescent moon passes it in the dawn on December 17. Venus is lost in the Sun’s glare all month, passing behind the Sun at Superior conjunction next month. Mars is also on the far side of the sun now. But Jupiter is at its best this winter, reaching opposition early in January, and well placed for observing in the NE shortly after sunset by Christmas. Saturn is also a good telescopic target in the southern sky by sunset in Aquarius.
Check skymaps.com and download the map for December 2025.
The square of Pegasus dominates the western sky. South of it are the watery constellations of Pisces (the fish), Capricorn (Sea Goat), Aquarius (the Water Bearer), with Saturn now, and Cetus (the Whale). Below Aquarius is Fomalhaut, the only first-magnitude star of the southern fall sky. It marks the mouth of Pisces Australius, the Southern Fish. Download Nocturne for Apple phones, and mount it on a tripod for 2’ exposures of the sky, which you can then annotate with star names, constellation lines, and even the mythological figures.
In my review of my photos from Chile, I will show you several examples of the exotic critters down under.
Yellow Capella, a giant star the same temperature and color as our much smaller Sun, dominates the overhead sky. It is part of the pentagon on stars making up Auriga, the Charioteer. Several nice binocular Messier open clusters are found in the winter Milky Way here. East of Auriga, the twins, Castor and Pollux, highlight the Gemini. UWF alumni can associate the pair with Jason and the Golden Fleece legend, for they were the first two Argonauts to sign up on his crew of adventurers. Jupiter lies just south of the twins; look for the fine grouping with the Supermoon on the evening of December 7.
South of Gemini, Orion is the most familiar winter constellation, dominating the eastern sky at dusk. The reddish supergiant Betelguese marks his eastern shoulder, while blue-white supergiant Rigel stands opposite on his western knee. Just south of the belt, hanging like a sword downward, is M-42, the Great Nebula of Orion, an outstanding binocular and telescopic stellar nursery. It is part of a huge spiral arm gas cloud, with active starbirth all over the place. We will find two even bigger such nurseries, eta Carinae and the Tarantula Nebula, in my southern shots.
In the east rise the hunter’s two faithful companions, Canis major and minor. Procyon is the bright star in the little dog, and rises minutes before Sirius, the brightest star in the sky. Sirius dominates the SE sky by 7 p.m., and as it rises, the turbulent winter air causes it to sparkle with shafts of spectral fire. Beautiful as the twinkling appears to the naked eye, for astronomers, this means the image is blurry; only in space can we truly see “clearly now." At eight light-years distance, Sirius is the closest star we can easily see with the naked eye from West Florida. You must be in South Florida to spot Alpha Centauri on June evenings. Below Sirius in binoculars is another fine open cluster, M-41, a fitting dessert for New Year’s sky feast. South of it is the second brightest star in the sky, Canopus. It will play a major role in my tour of the southern sky this month, guiding us to the Magellanic clouds!
At 77. I had always been obsessed with seeing the third of the sky below the Gulf as seen from my lifelong home in West Florida. I had glimpses of the Southern Cross and Centaurus when Merry and I were on honeymoon in Puerto Rico, and later the Halley hosts aboard the famed Love Boat in April 1986, but I longed for a longer look under the darkest skies on the planet on my bucket list. Encouraged by friends to attempt it before my Parkinson’s and mobility deteriorated further, I called Royal Adventures last spring and discussed participating in a tour of the great observatories in Chile in October. I made it, and our tour guide, Tony Flanders, has a fine story about our 30 expedition members in the new Sky and Telescope.
You will notice he was kind enough to include my shot of the eta Carinae nebula with my $400 See Star S 30 as the last photo in his report. I had a ball under the darkest skies on the planet, a kid in a cosmic candy store, gorging on such eye candy.
Outside, I set up my iPhone 12s on a portable $5 tripod (Vivitar pistol grip smartphone) and shot the four brightest stars in the sky we never see here.
At the top center is Alpha Centauri, the closest star to the Sun, only 4.3 light-years distant. A triple system, its three stars have several planets orbiting them! Below it is Beta Centauri, much more luminous but also far more distant at 400 light-years away. It too is a triple star. A vivid reminder that our Sun is unusual in being a bachelor! The two brightest stars of the famed Crux, the southern cross, lie at the bottom center, with the two fainter members already in the trees here. I would not get to see all four of them in all their glory until the morning skies a week later.
Here is a graphic example of the upside-down cosmos once you flip hemispheres. Our guide’s wife, Clara, used my iPhone 12s to photograph the northern sky from our hotel in San Pedro de Atacama. She was delighted to find Pegasus, the winged horse, finally running upright through the northern sky. Note the dolphin appears inverted as well.
As we headed inward, we spent one night at a hotel that had an excellent rooftop observing space for us and our scopes and phones. Do you recognize any of these constellations? The bright star at the top center, Achernar, is the end of Eridanus, the river, and the most southern star we can see from West Florida. We see nothing below it here.
But the two objects I most looked forward to observing were the large and small Magellanic Clouds. Magellan noted them on his circumnavigation as he rounded South America through the Strait that still bears his name, but certainly, natives had long observed them, and I suspect the Portuguese, sailing around the Cape of Good Hope even earlier, had also noted them. They are our own Milky Way’s two most obvious companion galaxies, and easily visible with the naked eye any time the sky itself is dark enough to spot our own Galaxy as well. I had the chance to see them best in the Atacama on a night so dark that the greenish airglow, a planet-wide aurorae familiar to the ISS astronauts from space, lit up the whole horizon, and the Milky Way cast shadows. Of all the shots I took with my iPhone 12s and Nocturne, this is my favorite.
Remember, I showed you a part of the Crux setting that first night. To catch it rising, I had to get up about 4 a.m. just before we returned home, and again, my iPhone 12s rewarded me with another special shot. This time, the whole southern cross is above the SE horizon at the bottom center. Note how it is tilted, with the long axis of Crux pointing to the upper right. Navigators soon discovered that if you went five times the length of the cross south, you knew about where the south celestial pole lurked in the southern sky, and from its altitude above the south point with your Compass, find your latitude in the southern hemisphere, where Polaris is never seen. Above Crux is the brightest part of the spring Milky Way that never rises here. It includes, in the center, the great eta Carinae nebula, superior to our M-42 in Orion; it is featured in the article.
Here is the Tarantula Nebula at the lower end of the LMC. I always wondered about the name, until I saw her bright white “fangs” show up at once as soon as I started this exposure. While with the naked eye, this nebula appears as bright as our own Orion Nebula, M-42, consider the distances involved. M-42 lies in our own arm of the Galaxy, a mere 1,500 ly distant. The LMC is over 100X more distant, and this huge star nursery is so large that if you put the center of it where M-42 lies, it would shine brighter than the full moon, and our solar system would be inside the outer arms of the spider! So much of the southern sky is on this grand scale. Only 40% of the bright stars lie in the northern hemisphere, and by far the brightest parts of our own Galaxy are best seen from down here. Seeing Sagittarius directly overhead at dusk was astounding!
While I have featured the closest and biggest and brightest globular cluster, Omega Centauri, often in this column, many of our party argued that 47 Tucanae, just above the SMC, is more beautiful. While I did not, like most of them, see it through the eyepiece of a 14” scope (I did NOT get on ladders!), even my S 30 agrees.
The best shot any of us got took the LMC was with Tom Leinhart’s S 50. The Tarantula is at the left edge of the bar here. If you wonder why both these companions look so mangled, it is our own fault. The massive Milky Way, over 100x the mass for the LMC, is tidally distorting and tearing apart these small galaxies as they are being drawn into their deaths by the three million solar mass black hole that lies in Sagittarius, and holds our own Sun and all other objects in our Galaxy in its gravitational lock. We are farther along in this process of galactic cannibalism with the Sagitarius Dwarf Galaxy, 70,000 ly away but mostly hidden on the far side of the Milky Way and hidden from our visual observation. At least a dozen similar small galaxies have been added to our massive home in the 12 billion years it has been growing and evolving.
Our own Galaxy was well mapped with my iPhone as well. Here it shows not only that bright central bulge around the Black Hole Sag A*, but also the lanes of dust which outlined the dark constellations of the Inca a thousand years ago.
Our best tour by far was at the Magellan telescopes. That’s because it was conducted in person by David Osip, associate director of the Las Campanas Observatory. I recognized him as a Gator (class of 1998; I got mine in 1979), and like me, Dr. John Oliver was head of his doctoral committee. He gave a splendid presentation on the observatory’s history, capabilities, and social dynamics, and answered a broad range of questions. One of the tour participants asked if Osip could show us how the scope moved, and he obligingly pointed it all around the dome as we watched.
Our NSF is funding the new Giant Magellan Telescope, with seven mirrors similar to the ones in the VLT domes, and the even larger European Southern Observatory’s Extremely Large Telescope. We saw the dome for it under construction. When completed in 2030, it will be larger in surface area than all the other telescopes on the planet combined!
Here I am with one of the two Magellan telescopes. When we were on the gantry and the giant scope was moved by Dr. Osip, it moved so smoothly that all of us felt that the building was rotating around the huge telescope, a feeling that many in the moving sky of the planetarium dome can relate to.
In addition to observing in visible light, the high, dry, clear skies make it ideal for infrared and even microwave astronomy. The ALMA microwave observatory is 16,000’ in altitude, and us old folks were not up to that adjustment. We had our own issues at 8,500’ for our observations. But we did get to visit the Operational support facilities for ALMA, where some of the microwave dishes are brought down for maintenance. Consider the working observatory has 50 of these 12-meter dishes working in unison as an interferometer. These were made to the same specifications in several nations. This is what gives rise to the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), currently the most powerful radio telescope on Earth. This achievement is the result of an international association between Europe (ESO), North America (NRAO), and East Asia (NAOJ), in collaboration with the Republic of Chile, to build the observatory of the “Dark Universe."
I had so many other memories and shots of the great observatories to share, but this mapping of the deep south with my smartphone and See Star was among the highlights of my Bucket List trip, and I encourage all who can to visit this beautiful nation and people, the Andes, the food, the culture, and the skies you can never forget.
Our final public planetarium show of 2025 is on December 5, at 6 p.m. in the Space and Science Theatre. “Let It Snow” is a fine celebration of the season, and our EAAA Christmas dinner follows at 7 p.m. in room 1709 at Pensacola State College. Get your tickets at Purple Pass early; the last few shows have all been SOLD OUT.
For more information on the Escambia Amateur Astronomers, visit us on Facebook. All EAAA events are free and open to the public.
