Bakersfield Night Sky — March 15, 2025
Our season of spring officially begins when the sun crosses north of the celestial equator at the March equinox. For those in the southern hemisphere, that marks the beginning of their season of fall/autumn. This year the March equinox is on March 20 and the sun makes that transition at 2:01 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time. With the sun rising close to exact east and setting close to exact west these past couple of weeks in conjunction with the spring forward of our clocks for daylight saving time, means the sun has been right in our faces or rearview mirror for the work commute! For the rest of spring, the sun will continue moving northward, rising earlier and setting later, so it won’t be blinding us during the commute.
A few nights ago, the sun, Earth, and moon were lined up for the total lunar eclipse. The two weeks before or after such a perfect line-up, will have an alignment of sun, moon, and Earth to make a solar eclipse. For March 2025, the solar eclipse alignment is after the lunar eclipse, on March 29. The new moon will partially cover the sun for those in northeastern North America, Greenland, Iceland, most of Europe, and northwestern Russia. Unfortunately, Bakersfield is nowhere near those sites. The best site will be northern Quebec with 93.1% of the sun covered by the moon. That still leaves plenty of the sun’s surface visible to keep things lit up enough that most people won’t see any difference. You’d need special solar filters to see the partially covered sun.
This evening (March 15) Mercury and Venus are side-by-side low in the west just after sunset, though Mercury is fading quickly and will be hard to spot to the left of Venus in the evening twilight. Venus will be at inferior conjunction between Earth and the sun on March 22. By the end of the month, it will be our “morning star”. On March 27, a thin waning crescent moon will be near Venus in the east before sunrise but this conjunction is not close. They’ll be about one spread-out hand at arm’s length apart from each other, Venus a bit to the left (north) of east and the moon a bit to the right (south) of east.
Jupiter and Mars are now the evening planets. Jupiter shines brilliantly above the head of Taurus and Mars is on the Pollux side of Gemini (the left twin). The attached star chart shows the view at 9 p.m. tonight looking south. The winter constellations of Orion, Taurus, and Canis Major with super-bright Sirius at its neck or nose (depending on how you connect the dots) are still prominent but the nice spring constellation, Leo, is coming into view in the east-southeast.
NASA’s SPHEREx and PUNCH successfully launched last Tuesday, March 11. SPHEREx is short for “Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer” and PUNCH stands for “Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere”—both definitely mouthfuls! Both will be two-year missions (or longer) but they will be investigating very different things.
SPHEREx is going to collect data on more than 450 million galaxies and more than 100 million stars in the Milky Way to probe for signatures of the super-rapid expansion that happened a fraction of a second after the Big Bang (something called “inflation”, which has nothing to do with the economy) as well as search the Milky Way for hidden reservoirs of water, carbon dioxide, and organic molecules that could be ingredients for life. Whereas Hubble and the James Webb observatories target specific objects, SPHEREx has a much wider field of view to gather spectral data in 102 different color bands on millions of objects very quickly. The color bands stretch from the optical (visible to our eyes) to the near-infrared. The most interesting objects will be tagged for Webb to look at more closely.
PUNCH will observe the Sun’s corona as it transitions into the solar wind, providing us with new information about how solar flares and coronal mass ejections form and evolve. That will enable us to better predict the arrival and impact of these potentially dangerous outbursts on our satellites and human and robotic explorers in space. With many hundreds of billions of dollars invested in and our crucial reliance on the satellites orbiting Earth for commerce, defense, communication, as well as science, we need to improve our understanding of “space weather”. See the PUNCH website and the SPHEREx website at for more about the goals and purposes of the missions and updates of what they’ve found. Like all of NASA’s missions, the data are in the public domain.
The next shows coming up at the William M Thomas Planetarium are: “Mars One-Thousand-One” on March 20, “Mesmerica” on April 4+5, and “Dynamic Earth” on April 10. I hope you’ll be able to come to one or more of the shows!
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Director of the William M Thomas Planetarium at Bakersfield College
Author of the award-winning website www.astronomynotes.com
