The Sky Above You, November 2025
by Duncan Lunan
The Moon is Full on November 5th, another 'supermoon' at its closest to the Earth, and the brightest since 2019. New Moon is on November 20th, at its furthest. The Moon is near Saturn on the 2nd and the Pleiades on the 6th, with Uranus to the right below, is near Jupiter and below Castor and Pollux on the night of the 10th, and near Venus low in the morning sky on the 18th. After New Moon and back in the evening sky, the Moon is above Saturn on the 29th.
The planet Mercury rises at 6 a.m. near the end of the month, after inferior conjunction with the Sun on the 20th.
Venus in Virgo rises at 5.30 a.m., was north of the Moon on the 1st, still very bright although low in the sky, and is passed by the waning crescent Moon on the morning of the 19th.
Mars is still out of sight behind the Sun this month. The interstellar visitor 3I/ATLAS, no ordinary comet, passed Mars between September 24th and October 5th, observed by ESA's Mars Express and Exomars Trace Gas Orbiter - considerably brighter than Comet McNaught was when it passed Mars in 2014, but still only a blob or a faint streak in time exposures. 3I/ATLAS was still behind the Sun at perihelion on October 29th, but on November 2nd it came into view from ESA's Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, when the 'comet' was expected to be most active. It won't emerge from behind the Sun until late November or early December, as seen from here, but it is being imaged by other spacecraft - see 'Space Notes' next Sunday, I hope.
Jupiter in Gemini now rises around 8 p.m., below Castor and Pollux, and is brilliant for the rest of the night, passed by the Moon on the 9th and 10th, and comes to its 'stationary point' on the 11th as the Earth begins to catch up with it before opposition on January 10th, 2026. The shadows of Io and Callisto cross the planet on the morning of November 21st.
Saturn in Aquarius sets about 2 a.m., with the Moon nearby on the 1st and 2nd, and again on the 29th, when it too is 'stationary' after opposition in September. Titan, the second largest moon in the Solar System, passes before and behind Saturn twice in November (details are in this month's issue of Astronomy Now), but its shadow no longer crosses the planet, though the rings are once again almost edge-on to us.
Observations by the James Webb Space Telescope in November 2014 have revealed strange shapes in the upper atmosphere of Saturn: strange dark blobs or 'beads', and lower down, a huge starlike feature, with two arms missing. There's no explanation for them at present, but it's been established that the 'beads' are vertical columns hundred of kilometres in height, while the vertices of the cap overlap those of the 'hexagon' below, which is shaped by surrounding cyclonic storms. The Andromeda Evolution (Harper Collins 2019), Daniel H. Wilson's authorised sequel to The Andromeda Strain by the late Michael Crichton, suggests that the hexagon shows the fast-mutating virus of the original has gained a foothold beyond Earth, which would make the resemblance of the 'star' to the black cap of a hanging judge doubly ominous.
Uranus in Taurus comes to opposition on the 21st, at its closest to Earth and due south at midnight, below the Pleiades and near the Moon on the 6th.
Neptune in Pisces is to the left of Saturn, setting around 2.30 a.m., passed by the Moon on the 30th.
The Leonid meteor shower from Comet Tempel-Tuttle peaks on the night of the 17th-18th, and will not be spoiled by the waning Moon in the morning sky.
As this column was first drafted, Comets Lemmon and Swan simultaneously made their closest approaches to Earth on October 21st, the former at 56 million miles and the latter at 24 million. Comet Lemmon was visible in binoculars in the evening sky, passing below the Plough and through Boötes, while Swan had just reached the morning sky in the northern hemisphere; both might have been seen with the naked eye in perfect conditions, but neither grew bright enough for that. Nevertheless my colleague Dr. Alan Cayless managed to get an excellent shot of Comet Lemmon from Bridge of Allan in a 40-minute exposure on October 23rd, after sunset, in which detail is visible in the tail, though slightly blurred due to movement away from the nucleus. By 6 a.m. it might in theory have been visible again from here on Arran, but it was behind a tree until the sky began to grow light. At the end of October Comet Lemmon was below the head of Serpens, while Swan will be visible above the southern horizon, between stars Sadalmelik and Sadalsuud in the constellation Aquarius, above the first quarter Moon.
More about 3I/ATLAS shortly!
Duncan Lunan’s recent books are available through Amazon; details are on Duncan’s website, www.duncanlunan.com.
The Sky Above You
By Duncan Lunan
About this Column
I began writing this column in early 1983 at the suggestion of the late Chris Boyce. At that time the Post Office would allow 1000 free mailings to start a new business, just under the number of small press newspapers in the UK at the time. I printed a flyer with the help of John Braithwaite (of Braithwaite Telescopes) offering a three-part column for £5, with the sky this month, a series of articles for beginners, and a monthly news feature. The column ran from May 1983 to May 1993 in various newspapers and magazines, but never in more than five outlets at a time, although every one of those 1000-plus papers would have included an astrology column. Since then it’s appeared sporadically in a range of publications including The Southsider in Glasgow and the Dalyan Courier in Turkey, but most often, normally three times per year, in Jeff Hawke’s Cosmos from the first issue in March 2003 until the last in January 2018, with a last piece in “Jeff Hawke, The Epilogue” (Jeff Hawke Club, 2020). It continues to appear monthly in Troon's Going Out and Orkney News, with an expanded version broadcast monthly on Arransound Radio since August 2023
The monthly maps for the column were drawn for me by Jim Barker, based on similar, uncredited ones in Dr. Leon Hausman’s “Astronomy Handbook” (Fawcett Publications, 1956). Jim had to redraw or elongate several of them because they were drawn for mid-US latitudes, about 40 degrees North, making them usable over most of the northern hemisphere. The biggest change needed was in November when only Dubhe, Merak and Megrez of the Big Dipper, as the US version called it, were visible at that latitude. In the UK, all the stars of the Plough are circumpolar, always above the horizon. We decided to keep an insert in the January map showing the position of M42, the Great Nebula in the Sword of Orion, and for that reason, to stick with the set time of 9 p.m., (10 p.m. BST in summer), although in Scotland the sky isn’t dark then during June and July.
To use the maps in theory you should hold them overhead, aligning the North edge to true north, marked by Polaris and indicated by Dubhe and Merak, the Pointers. It’s more practical to hold the map in front of you when looking south and then rotate it as you face east, south and west. Some readers are confused because east is on the left, opposite to terrestrial maps, but that’s because they’re the other way up. When you’re facing south and looking at the sky, east is on your left.
The star patterns are the same for each month of each year, and only the positions of the planets change. (“Astronomy Handbook” accidentally shows Saturn in Virgo during May, showing that the maps weren’t originally drawn for the Hausman book.) Consequently regular readers for a year will by then have built up a complete set of twelve.
©DuncanLunan2013, updated monthly since then.