Chris: Hello and welcome to Star Diary, the podcast from the makers of BBC Sky at Night Magazine. You can subscribe to the digital edition of the magazine by visiting iTunes, Google Play, or Apple News, or to the print edition by visiting skyatnightmagazine.com.
Ezzy: Greetings listeners. And welcome to Star Diary, a weekly guide to the best things to see in the northern hemisphere's night sky. As we are based here in the UK, all times are in BST. In this episode, we'll be covering the coming week from 26 August to 1 September. I'm Ezzy Pearson, the magazine's features editor, and I'm joined today by astronomy writer Mary McIntyre.
Hello Mary.
Listen to the previous episode, "The Super Blue Moon rises (Star Diary 19 to 25 August 2025)"
Mary: Hi Ezzy.
Ezzy: So, what do we have to look forward to in this week's night sky?
Mary: Well, this week the Moon is occulting something again, but this time it's the Pleiades. We've got several nice lunar pairings and lots of planet action, and it's also a really good week for observing the Milky Way.
So I'm going to start off with the planets. Venus is technically visible but it's going to be kind of lost in the evening twilight so although it's the brightest of the planets you will need binoculars to see that.
Please wait until after the Sun has set and then Venus will be above the horizon for 45 minutes after that. So let the Sun set, wait about 15 minutes and then seek it out and you should be able to spot it with binoculars in the western sky very low down.
It is going to get better again, it's just not great right now.
Ezzy: It's the thing with planets, they ebb and they flow. Sometimes they're really interesting and good to see and sometimes they're a bit more challenging.
Mary: Yeah, I mean a couple of months ago we were doing this with virtually no planets visible at all.
Ezzy: Yeah, it's definitely an improvement on where we were this time six months ago.
Mary: Yeah, definitely. Saturn is a better one to look for, that rises at around about 8:30PM in the evening, and that's going to then stay visible all night long.
It's mag +0.7, which doesn't sound very bright, but it just kind of stands out on the sky. It's not twinkling as much as a star, and it is really nice to see with the naked eye as it moves across the sky.
But if you have binoculars, a telescope, you will see the rings, hopefully. They're harder to see right now because they're almost edge on, but with a larger aperture equipment you should be able to see that visually.
Neptune is just below Pisces and that's rising about 8:30PM in the eastern sky. That is mag +7.7 so you'll definitely need optical aids for that and you will need optical aids for Uranus as well at mag +5.8. That is in Taurus and rising at 10:30PM.
Mars and Jupiter are still really well placed. Mars is mag +0.9 this week, it's brightened a little bit. Jupiter mag -2.2. They're both in Taurus and they're both rising about 11:40PM and then stay visible till dawn. So really good month for Mars and Jupiter. Mercury is still lost in the sun's glare unfortunately, so we can't see Mercury this week.
Ezzy: Again, it will be back.
Mary: It will be back.
We have the opportunity to see some shadow transits again this week. These are very frequent occurrences and there are full lists of when they're happening available online. But on 27 August at 2:00AM in the morning, Europa is going to emerge from behind Jupiter.
So we normally talk about stuff transiting the disk, but those moons go behind Jupiter as well and then come back out again.
So you'll see, just watch Jupiter and you'll suddenly see the moon appear from behind.
On 1 September, we've got stuff doing the other thing, which is from 2:25AM in the morning through till 4:35AM in the morning. Io, shadow transit across the disc. And from 3:40AM onwards, Io itself is actually transiting the disc as well.
So we get to see Io on the disc and the shadow of Io on the disc. And at 5:05AM, Europa joins the party when its shadow then starts to transit the disc as well. So these are really fun ones to do if you're doing animation. If you're an imager, just take pictures of it at different points and put a video together and you really get a sense for that like miniature Solar System thing in action.
It's awesome to see.
Ezzy: I do have to say I love those. Jupiter is a fantastic planet to take videos of. We have a guide over on our website, skyatnightmagazine.com, if people are interested in learning how to do that.
But quite often the focus is on "look at how you can see all the clouds moving in the Great Red Spot." But I just love seeing the little moons nipping around.
Mary: Yeah, they're good things to sketch as well. If you want to practice your astronomy drawing, just actually marking out the position of them every couple of hours, and night after night, you can really get that sense of what Galileo did, and I love that.
If you want to challenge, Pluto is still located between Capricornus and Ophiuchus, so it's only reaching 14º above the horizon in the sky. South and that is at around 10:45PM at night. It remains visible through till 2:45AM in the morning. You will need a fairly large telescope to see that +14.4.
With a photography target, you've got more chance probably of picking it up than you will visually. It will be a pixel probably on your camera, but it's still really fun to take pictures of Pluto.
Moving on to the Moon, this week we've got the Moon moving from last quarter through to new Moon, which means it's out of the way when it goes dark, which is a great time to kind of observe some of the other deep sky stuff. But there are some nice pairings with the Moon and an occultation.
So, on 26 August, the last quarter Moon is going to actually occult one of the stars of the Pleiades. In the UK we're not quite in the right position to have more of the Pleiades obscured, but the bottom star. If you think of the Pleiades as kind of like a little diamond with a tail, it's that tail star that is going to get occulted. It's called Atlas, that star.
That's going to happen at 4:50AM in the morning. It's going to disappear behind the illuminated half of the Moon, and then it's going to emerge from the non illuminated side of the Moon at 5:20, thereabouts. So the exact time will be different from your location, so just look that up and make sure that you don't miss that.
But it's always fun to see a star appearing from the non illuminated side of the Moon. It's kind of like it's not there. It's hidden by an invisible thing, essentially.
Ezzy: And then suddenly it just Pop! Into life.
Mary: Yeah, it's really good fun and that's a bright star to be doing that with. It's not like... I remember doing a Uranus occultation and it's like you can barely see the planet at all.
This is a bright star so this will be a fun one to observe.
Ezzy: The moon's been slowly creeping closer closer to the Pleiades and now it's actually sort of going in, at the moment. So there's definitely going to be some cool opportunities with the Moon and the Pleiades over the coming month.
Mary: Yeah, and I love the Pleiades, so I never need an excuse to look at that.
Ezzy: It is a gorgeous thing to look at.
Mary: It really is.
On 27 August, the 42% Moon is going to be just 6.8º above Jupiter, and Mars is going to be a similar distance to the lower left of the Moon as well. So that'll be a nice trio to look for.
28 August, the Moon will then be a 32% waning crescent, and that's going to be 4.7º to the upper left of Mars, 8.75º to the left of Jupiter, so again, the chance to see all three of them.
On the 30th, we've now got a fairly slim waning crescent Moon, it's going to be just 2.5º to the lower right of Pollux. Castor and Pollux from Gemini, the lower star of those, so the Moon will be near there.
And on 31 August, the 7% crescent Moon is going to be just 3º above M44, the Beehive Cluster.
It can be a bit of a challenge when the Moon is very brightly lit near the Beehive Cluster because the light from the Moon obliterates deep sky objects, but when it's a crescent, I think it makes a really beautiful photo opportunity, so that'll be a really nice one to look out for.
Comet 13P Olbers is still moving through Coma Berenices and it will be 17º above the western horizon at 9:30PM. It's going to fade now probably to around about mag +9.0 thereabouts, so you will need a telescope to see it. On 26 August, it's going to be 1º northwest of the Black Eye Galaxy, which will be a really nice opportunity to see that.
And on 31 August, it's going to form a triangle with two globular clusters, M53 and NGC 5053. So again, having the comet in conjunction with other objects, I always think makes for a really interesting photograph.
Ezzy: Especially because it's so difficult to predict what the comet itself is going to look like.
But chances are, it's have some kind of tail that you can capture and just having those sorts of different types of shapes next to each other, there's some great compositions that you can get. With nature's help, obviously.
Mary: I really do love a comet deep sky conjunction. I just, I don't know.
I just think they're so beautiful because they're all not necessarily always in our Galaxy. Like comets are in the galaxy when we're seeing them, but they're not from there. The galaxy in the background is not in our Galaxy either. And they're just such distant objects. And I just really love seeing them like that.
Ezzy: There is something about any time when you capture something that's within our Solar System and then you'll have stars from our own Galaxy and then something that's beyond our Galaxy in there as well and you get all sort of three layers in something together.
There is definitely a quality about that. It taps into something in my brain anyway. Just makes it that bit more special when you can see the whole universe in one go.
Mary: Okay, so while the Moon is out of the way, it's a really good time to observe the Milky Way. Over the last few weeks, we haven't really had a lot of true darkness in the sky because we were near mid summer.
This time of year, we are starting to get darker nights again, and that is a really good time to observe the Milky Way, which is now running pretty much directly overhead, and it kind of has the gbit towards the Galactic core which is low in the southwest and then it just spans directly overhead all the way over to the northeastern horizon.
And I think it's really great to look at the southern part of the Milky Way but it's not just there, it's kind of up over your head, it's over the other side of the sky and seeing all of it in its entirety on a dark night with no Moon is just absolutely beautiful. And you've got more chance of seeing it now we're getting some actual darkness.
So there are so many deep sky objects within the kind of area around the galactic core. If you go into Stellarium, switch on deep sky stuff and look at that area, it is just jam packed with clusters and star clusters, but it's also interesting to look at the dark bits as well. And the Indigenous Australian mythology for the Milky Way was The Great Emu in the sky, but the emu shape was made from the dark dust in between the Milky Way rather than the stars themselves.
Ezzy: And if you go and you look at pictures of the Milky Way taken from Australia, you can see the emu. It's definitely an emu. But we were talking about this last week, it's sometimes the dust blocking out the stars that actually can make some of the most incredible shapes that you can see on the night sky.
Mary: Yeah, it's really beautiful. I think the Polynesians had mythology that the Milky Way was a giant cloud eating shark, and I think we could all do some of those sometimes in this country.
Ezzy: I can see shark as well. Yeah, look at the Milky Way for long enough and you'll see all sorts of things in it.
Mary: And another dark thing that you can kind of look for is the Dark Horse Nebula.
So down low to the right of Ophiuchus, kind of in the corner of Ophiuchus, if you look at the Milky Way around there, or certainly if you take a longer exposure picture of it, you'll have all the gas and dust that's the kind of bright knotty bits, but the dark bits in between make out kind of the silhouette of the prancing horse.
And the first time I photographed that I was like, "Oh, it actually does look like a horse. Oh my goodness". I just hadn't noticed it with binoculars, but it was definitely a horse. So that's one to look for.
And also directly overhead, the bit of the Milky Way around Cygnus is really bright. And because it's directly overhead, it isn't as affected by light pollution as the stuff lower down.
So if you are somewhere that suffers a bit from light pollution, just get yourself into your garden shielded from head-, streetlights, car headlights etc and just look straight up and let your-, eyes get a dark adapted and you will see the patch of the Milky Way around Cygnus.
And one of the things that stands out there the most is the Great Rift which is that really dark band in between the bright bits so definitely have a look out for that.
So there's loads to see within the Milky Way so it's a really good week to do that before it starts to set.
Ezzy: The Milky Way is a fantastic thing to observe visually. It's also a great photo opportunity, as you mentioned there, there's so many things in it that you can capture on camera. And you can actually do a lot of that with a DSLR camera, which a lot of people have at home.
So if anybody is more interested in learning how you can start to take photographs of things like the Milky Way, then we have a masterclass series that will be running from September for a couple of months. Going through all aspects, including taking pictures of the Milky Way, which will be done by Mary herself.
So if you want some of Mary's great tips about how to photograph the Milky Way with a DSLR, check our show notes below where we have a link to the Masterclass.
Click here to get your tickets to our DSLR Astro Imaging Masterclass
Mary: So two quick things to finish with. First of all, there are some really beautiful, high and bright pre dawn International Space Station passes this week.
It's visible every night, multiple passes per night. So just have a check online and see when that's going to be visible from where you are. And finally, just to mention again, that we're kind of still eagerly awaiting for T. Coronae Borealis nova to happen. They predicted that it may possibly occur by September.
We don't know exactly when it will happen. It might not happen this year, but it might have already happened by now. It's just one of those things we're just waiting. It's called the blaze star, which I find quite amusing because it's mag +10.0 normally, so you can't see it naked eye. And when it brightens, it's only mag +2.0.
So that's not something I describe as blazing myself, but I guess compared to where it was before.
Ezzy: That is still a big jump.
Chris: It is a big jump.
Ezzy: I can't remember, like, I can't remember how quite how much it translates in terms of but that's. Like exponentially, each level of magnitude is exponentially more than the last.
Mary: It is, I'm being unfair. But the way that some of the press have been reporting this, you'd think that there was going to be a daytime visible supernova happening, and it's really not that. It's going to be about the same brightness as Polaris.
Ezzy: Yeah, that's what I was going to say.
That helps people gauge their expectations a bit better, I think.
It will definitely be, if you're familiar with that area of the night sky, it will look different.
Mary: Yeah, I mean, take a picture of Corona Borealis now, so that when this does happen, you can take another picture and show that there's a new star there. It is really fun to do that, even if it is only a mag +2.0 star.
It wasn't there before and now it is and that's really awesome. This is an 80 year cycle, so the star that we're talking about is just a little bit below Epsilon Corona Borealis. So it's a really close to the main constellation, so it is kind of easy to find. So yeah, look out for that. Keep your eyes peeled on news on that one.
Ezzy: Well, it certainly sounds like there's lots of absolutely fascinating things to look for in the night sky, including some that might come by surprise as well. Thank you very much for taking us through all of that, Mary.
If listeners at home would like to get even more highlights about what's coming up in the night sky, do subscribe to the Star Diary podcast.
But to go over this week again. In terms of planets, Venus is going to be visible in the evening twilight, but it will be quite low and only visible for a short amount of time after sunset. However, Saturn, Neptune, Uranus, Mars and Jupiter all rise throughout the evening and continue to be a great opportunity to take a look at those planets.
Jupiter particularly will have moon transits on 17 August and 1 September. If you want a slightly more challenging planetary object, then Pluto is still between Capricornus and Ophiuchus. So a great opportunity to look for those.
In terms of the Moon, it's moving from last quarter towards new.
On 26 August, the quarter moon will be in front of the Pleiades and will actually occult one of the Pleiades stars as well. So that's worth looking out for.
On 27 and 28 August, you can also see the Moon, Jupiter and Mars forming a bit of trio in the night sky as they are all together.
But as the Moon is going to be new or moving towards new this week, it'll be a great opportunity to take a look at the Milky Way whilst it's out of the way. There's some great objects in there and lots of things to be able to see.
Comet 13 P Olbers will also be going through Coma Berenice. And the ISS will make several great passes throughout the week.
You also might want to keep an eye out on T Corona Borealis, a star that is expected to flare in brightness at some point in the coming months, so make sure that you keep an eye on that one as well. So lots of things to be looking out for in the night sky.
From all of us here at Sky at Night Magazine, goodbye.
If you want to find out even more spectacular sights that will be gracing the night sky this month, be sure to pick up a copy of BBC Sky at Night Magazine, where we have a 16 page pull out sky guide with a full overview of everything worth looking up for throughout the whole month. Whether you like to look at the Moon, the planets, or the deep sky, whether you use binoculars, telescopes, or neither.
Our Sky Guide has got you covered, with detailed star charts to help you track your way across the night sky. From all of us here at BBC Sky at Night Magazine, goodbye.
Chris: Thank you for listening to this episode of the Star Diary podcast from the makers of BBC Sky Night Magazine, which was edited by Lewis Dobbs.
For more of our podcasts, visit our website at skyatnightmagazine.com/podcasts, or head to Spotify, iTunes, or your favourite podcast player.
Listen to next week's episode "See a starry waterfall in the night sky (2 to 8 September 2024)"
