There's lots to see in the night sky throughout winter and the Christmas period, and stargazing is a great way to make the most of the longer, darker nights.
If you're planning on doing some stargazing over Christmas, you can see a wealth of winter targets from planets to stars, star clusters and even a galaxy, all with the naked eye.
We’ve picked 10 glittering delights, all of them visible to the naked eye, so you don’t have to worry if you’re waiting to unwrap your first telescope on the 25th.
More winter astronomy
Some of our 10 treats will only be clearly visible if you’re out under a dark sky on a night with no Moon blazing; for these, avoid the five days either side of December’s full Moon (dubbed the Cold Moon) on the 15th.
We’ve also provided star charts to help you find each target, and given descriptions of what you’ll be able to see with binoculars or a telescope.
So, finish that glass of mulled wine, wrap up warm and let’s get out in the crisp night air for some winter stargazing.
1. Venus
Our first winter stargazing target is an ld favourite naked-eye sight.
Look towards the southwest as twilight deepens and you’ll see what looks like a very bright, blue-white star, low in the sky. This is the planet Venus.
It starts December 2024 in the constellation of Sagittarius and not very high in the sky, so avoid any trees or buildings that might block it from view.
However, to the naked eye, Venus’s sheer brightness will make it a beacon; with an impressive magnitude of –4.2, it will outshine everything else in the sky apart from the Moon.
Then, as we get closer to the 25th, this ‘Christmas Star’ will get higher in the twilight sky, moving up into the next-door constellation of Capricornus and staying around for longer after sunset (as much as four hours after by New Year’s Eve).
Binoculars will greatly enhance its brightness, but won’t be powerful enough to see its disc.
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Through a small- to medium-aperture telescope, you’ll be able to see Venus’s disc. Over the festive period, it will be at a waning gibbous phase and close to half lit.
At the start of December, when it’s low to the horizon, the ‘Evening Star’ will shimmer like you’re seeing it through a wobbly jelly. The view steadies through the month as Venus climbs in altitude.
2. Saturn
Look to the upper left of Venus, quite high above the southern horizon, and you’ll see the planet Saturn shining like a yellow-white star.
Although it’s a lot fainter than Venus, shining at magnitude +1.0, Saturn will also be clearly visible to the naked eye, and with no stars of the same brightness around it, you’ll find it easily.
Saturn is some 1.4 billion kilometres (887 million miles) away, which means its light takes 80 minutes to reach us.
Saturn's famous rings aren’t visible through binoculars, but if you have a pair they’ll show you its largest moon, Mercury-sized Titan, looking like a star shining close to Saturn.
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You need a telescope to see Saturn’s beautiful, icy ring system, but at the moment they’re not actually that impressive to look at.
At this point in its 29.4-year orbit around the Sun, Saturn is slowly tipping away from us, so the rings are currently presented almost edge-on, making them very hard to see without significant magnification.
They’ll appear to almost vanish next March in what’s called a ring plane crossing, but Saturn will be too close to the Sun to allow us to see this amazing disappearing act.
3. Albireo
This is one of the most famous double stars in the sky. Located at the head (or beak) of the constellation Cygnus, the Swan, it is approximately 400 lightyears away.
To the naked eye, Albireo appears as a single bluish star with an apparent magnitude of +3.0, making it the faintest of the five stars which can be joined up to make the well-known Northern Cross asterism.
If you have a very powerful pair of binoculars held steady on a tripod, you might be able to see a much fainter companion star close to the blue one, but a telescope is needed to split the pair properly.
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Through a telescope at medium to high magnification, Albireo transforms into a pair of jewels, one sapphire blue, the other rich gold, like two Christmas tree lights shining and flashing close together. This striking colour contrast is what makes Albireo one of the most popular double stars in the whole sky.
4. Vega
Close to Albireo, you’ll see an eye-catchingly bright blue-white star. This is Vega, the brightest star in Lyra.
Shining at magnitude 0.0, it’s the brightest of the three stars in the Summer Triangle and the fifth-brightest in the sky.
Located just 25 lightyears away, Vega is one of the closest stars to us.
Due to Earth’s precession – the way it (very) slowly wobbles around its polar axis – Vega was the Pole Star 12,000 years ago and will be again in 12,500 years’ time.
Astronomers have observed a dust disc around Vega, indicating it could have a planetary system in the making.
Sci-fi fans know Vega as the star from which the mysterious alien signal is transmitted in Carl Sagan’s book (and the subsequent film) Contact.
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Although binoculars and telescopes are nowhere near powerful enough to show the dust disc around Vega, they do hugely enhance the star’s colour, brightness and beauty, transforming it into a shimmering diamond blazing in the darkness.
If you sweep your telescope a short distance to the northeast of Vega, you’ll see the popular multiple-star system of Epsilon Lyrae, known as the Double Double, two double stars orbiting each other.
5. The Hercules Cluster
Also known as Messier 13 (or M13), this globular cluster in the constellation of Hercules was discovered by Edmond Halley in 1714 and is one of the most beautiful and widely observed clusters in the northern sky.
With an apparent magnitude of +5.8, it is just about visible to the naked eye on dark, moonless nights as a smudge on the right side of the Hercules ‘Keystone’ asterism.
Located 25,000 lightyears away and spanning 145 lightyears across, M13 contains at least several hundred thousand stars, possibly more than a million, and is approximately 12 billion years old, making it almost as old as our Milky Way.
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If you look at the Hercules Cluster, M13, through binoculars, you’ll see it as a greyish patch, resembling an out-of-focus star. Through a medium-aperture telescope (around 4–10 inches), the cluster’s appearance is transformed.
It becomes a condensed ball of pinprick silvery stars. A large telescope (18 inches and upwards) and high magnification will open up magical views, resolving so many stars that they look like a pile of salt grains.
6. Jupiter
The largest planet in our Solar System by far, Jupiter is an enormous gas giant world big enough to swallow up our Earth 1,000 times over and still have ample room left for its extended family of almost 100 moons.
During December it will be rising in the northeast in the constellation of Taurus, to the left of the arrowhead-shaped Hyades star cluster.
With an apparent magnitude of –2.8, it is strikingly bright to the naked eye, appearing like a yellow-white star that’s so much brighter than anything around it that you really can’t miss it.
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A pair of small binoculars is all you need to see Jupiter’s four largest moons, the so-called Galilean moons. How many you will see depends on where they are in their orbits around Jupiter.
Through a telescope, you’ll be able to see Jupiter’s disc crossed by dark cloud belts and, if you’re looking at the right time, the Great Red Spot, a storm system much larger than our whole planet.
7. The Hyades
One of the largest star clusters in the sky, the Hyades represents the sharp horns of Taurus, the Bull.
Some observers think it resembles a ‘V’ lying on its left side, while others see an arrowhead or a ‘greater than’ symbol.
Whatever you see, the Hyades is an open star cluster with an apparent magnitude of +0.5, which contains several hundred stars.
It has been known since prehistoric times and appears in various cave paintings and rock carvings.
The brightest star in the cluster, the orange star Aldebaran, is not actually a member of the group; it just happens to lie in the same direction as seen from Earth.
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The Hyades cluster is so big that it’s best seen with the naked eye; you can’t really ‘zoom in’ on it with binoculars or a telescope. But if you do sweep along and around it with either of those, you’ll be rewarded with lovely views of many colourful stars, and Aldebaran’s smoky orange hue is a beautiful sight to see.
8. The Pleiades
Formally known as Messier 45, the Pleiades is one of the most well-known and beautiful star clusters in the entire sky.
It is also one of the nearest clusters to Earth, located about 440 lightyears away.
This is a well-loved winter stargazing target and one of the most impressive objects that can be easily seen with the naked eye.
Spanning 43 lightyears across, the cluster contains around 1,000 stars, but it gets its nickname ‘The Seven Sisters’ from the fact that its seven brightest stars are visible to the naked eye, forming a shape resembling a mini Big Dipper.
Some people are able to even see as many as 10 or 11 stars.
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Binoculars reveal many dozens of stars in the Pleiades, and if you look at the cluster through a telescope with a low-magnification eyepiece, it’s a stunning sight.
Then the Seven Sisters appear as a spray of sapphires wider than the full Moon. On frosty, Moon-free nights, high magnification brings out hints of the gas and dust the cluster’s stars are drifting through as they move through space.
9. The Double Cluster
This is a pair of star clusters so close together that they’re almost touching, located between the constellations Cassiopeia and Perseus.
Known as h and χ (Chi) Persei, they are visible to the naked eye as a large smudge, high in the sky beneath the ‘W’ of Cassiopeia on Moon-free nights without light pollution.
Strangely, despite their brightness and prominence, Charles Messier didn’t include them in his famous catalogue of objects that could be mistaken for comets, even though many larger and much less comet-like objects such as the Pleiades are in it.
Each cluster spans about half a degree (the width of the Moon) across. The clusters are approximately 7,000 lightyears away and only a few hundred lightyears apart.
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The Double Cluster is a very pretty sight in binoculars: two concentrations of stars surrounded by a scattering of others, but the pair truly come to life in a telescope.
They fill the view through low-power eyepieces and spill over the edge of the view with high-magnification eyepieces. If you let them drift through your telescope’s field of view, you can easily imagine you’re flying through them.
10. The Andromeda Galaxy
The final object on our winter stargazing list is the largest and furthest away. If you look to the right of the Double Cluster, at around the same altitude you will spot what looks like a large, pale, oval smudge out of the corner of your eye.
This is M31, the Andromeda Galaxy. For a long time it was known as the Great Andromeda Nebula and thought to be a cloud of gas within our Milky Way.
We now know it’s an enormous Catherine wheel of stars 2.5 million lightyears away, the nearest spiral galaxy to our own Milky Way and possibly twice its size.
M31 is the most distant object visible to the naked eye – but only under a very dark sky; any light pollution or moonlight will hide it from view.
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Under good seeing conditions, a pair of binoculars shows M31 as a large smoky oval. Through a telescope, you’ll see light, mottled patches within this oval – dense clouds of stars in its spiral arms similar to the Cygnus Star Cloud.
Large telescopes will reveal dark dust lanes crossing it, giving a tantalising hint of the galaxy’s spiral shape, which we can’t see clearly because from Earth we see it at an oblique angle, tipped away from us.
What are your favourite winter stargazing targets? Let us know by emailing contactus@skyatnightmagazine.com
