Southern Hemisphere night sky tonight, February 2025

If you're based in the Southern Hemisphere and want to know what you can see in the night sky tonight, this page is for you.

Our monthly-updated night-sky guide will show you what you can see in the Southern Hemisphere over the coming weeks.

We'll include monthly highlights, stars, constellations, planets and deep-sky objects.

For more advice, read our guides to Southern Hemipshere stargazing and the best night-sky targets to see in Australia.

Highlights

Four planets that were in conjunction with the Sun and invisible last month now return to the eastern predawn sky.

Brilliant Venus is by far the brightest, with Saturn 8° to the right, shining at first magnitude.

At a similar brightness is Mercury, 2° below Saturn.

Neptune (needing a telescope to view) rises from below Mercury and they pass on 17th, only 0.6° apart.

On 25 April a thin crescent Moon has an impressive conjunction with Venus and Saturn, forming an isosceles triangle.

Conjunction of Venus, the Moon and Jupiter by Teale Britstra, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. Equipment: Canon 600D, 18-55mm lens

Stars and constellations

In April, our magnificent Milky Way is seen edge-on, with its many open star clusters and nebulae residing in the plane of our Galaxy.

In contrast, to the north is the realm of distant galaxies.

Common to both regions, scattered across the sky are globular star clusters, which are distributed in a sphere centred on our galactic core.

You might say stars are common to both too, but most naked-eye examples are solar neighbours, only a couple of hundred lightyears away.

The Planets

Uranus is poorly placed, setting around the end of twilight mid-month.

It’s followed by another denizen of the outer Solar System, Jupiter, which spends April inside the horns of Taurus, not far from Aldebaran.

Get onto Jupiter early, as it will be setting around 21:00. Mars is a more leisurely target, being near the meridian at sunset and departing around midnight.

There’s no further planetary action until Venus, Saturn, Mercury and Neptune are visible low in the predawn sky.

15 - Venus and Jupiter conjunction Zdenek Bardon, La Silla, Chile, 26 November 2019 Equipment: Nikon D810A DSLR camera — Venus and Jupiter conjunction by Zdenek Bardon, La Silla, Chile, 26 November 2019

Deep-sky

This month, a trip to Hydra. Near its border with Centaurus lies the spectacular galaxy M83 or NGC 5236 (RA 13h 37.0m, dec. –29° 52’).

Even a 60mm scope shows this seventh-magnitude barred spiral’s distinctive bright core with a 5-arcminute long bar, surrounded by a 14-arcsecond halo.

Larger scopes show this to be mottled; 200mm will reveal spiral arms curving off the ends of the bar in an anticlockwise direction.

Heading westward, Hydra presents another gem: NGC 3242, aka the Ghost of Jupiter Nebula (RA 10h 24.8m, dec. –18° 39’).

This seventh-magnitude pale-blue planetary gets its name from being around the same size as the planet Jupiter, at 30 x 38 arcseconds

Its obvious disc has a fuzzy edge, with an 11th-magnitude central star. If the seeing is good, look for a dark gap surrounding this star.

The Southern Pinwheel Galaxy, M83, by the Victor M Blanco 4-Meter Telescope, 6 December 2024. Credit: CTIO/NOIRLab/DOE/NSF/AURA. Image processing: T.A. Rector (University of Alaska Anchorage/NSF NOIRLab), D. de Martin (NSF NOIRLab) & M.Zamani (NSF NOIRLab)

Southern Hemisphere Star Charts

Access this month's and all previous star charts for the Southern Hemisphere by clicking on the links below.

Best things to see in the Southern Hemisphere sky this month

Highlights

Stars and constellations

The Planets

Deep-sky

Southern Hemisphere Star Charts

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