Mary Stewart Adams

Once you can identify the handle and ladle of the Big Dipper, you can make your way to a lot of other night sky wonders, including Comet ZTF, the green comet that has dominated the astronomy headlines for several weeks now.

If the skies are clear this week, we’ll see the waning gibbous Moon making a path through the stars of Leo and Virgo, rising later each night, until it gets to the eve of its last quarter on Friday the 13th; then it rises after midnight.

In the Christian world, the holy nights of Christmas culminate this week on the 12th Night, January 5th, followed by the year’s first Full Moon on Friday, January 6th, the Feast of Epiphany, celebrated both as the arrival of the Three Kings to the birth of the Christ Child, and as the date of the Baptism of Jesus of Nazareth.

There’s a beautiful asterism that rises up in the East after sunset every year in December, described by astronomers as the Winter Hexagon.

The big news in astronomy this week is the occultation of Mars by the Full Moon on Wednesday evening, December 7 at 11:08 pm ~ visible for most of the United States.

The last month of the year begins this week, and in grand, poetic style, the planet of love and beauty, which spent most of the year as our morning star, and has of late been awash in the light of the Sun, will soon emerge in her evening gown, adorning the end of the day and the end of the year with celestial brilliance.

In that great journey of the stars through space About the mighty, all-directing Sun, The pallid, faithful Moon, has been the one Companion of the Earth.

At waning crescent phase, the Moon is a beautiful silver chalice, gathering up the last remaining mysteries of the night as it cascades through the dawn. This week, it gathers cosmic secrets from Leo, where a meteor shower is now underway.

Tuesday November 8, 2022 there’s a Total Lunar Eclipse, visible over all of the Americas, coming to maximum at about 6 am eastern time, and caused by the fact that the Moon, now in front of the starry region of Taurus, the Bull, is sweeping through the deep shadow of the Earth.

The planet Saturn has resumed direct motion after five months of journeying retrograde, or westward against the background of stars, and because Jupiter is still going westward in its motion, the two gas giants are moving slightly closer together right now.