Caoimhín's Content

A whole new year is beginning, and we will have plenty to see and look at! Of course we’ll be taking a close look at each month as it comes, and we’ll pay special attention to the big events of the year, such as eclipses, as they come. In this video, we’re going to look at some of the basics, the planets, the constellations and the meteor showers, and when an where they’ll appear in our sky. As we go through the year, we’ll move around from evening to morning, but keep in mind that the time when darkness comes and goes will also change. We can start by looking at night time as early as 6 o’clock, but as we reach the end of January and push into February sunset will keep getting later, and we’ll have to wait until later for the stars to come out. By the time we reach July, we’ll be waiting until practically midnight for darkness.

Some things in the sky will take a while to change. Although we lose Saturn some time in February, Jupiter will stay up well into March. Of course, with the Sun setting later, it won’t be clearly visible for long. By the time we’re through to the middle of the year, the planets are pretty much gone from the evening sky, but of course the evening will come pretty late. By the time we reach the summer solstice in Ireland, there’s a slight glow of the Sun all night long, creeping along the northern horizon from West to East. The Sun will still be up in Iceland at that time, and a little bit of the glow creeps into our sky as well. You might notice as well that the Moon will be low in the South when it’s full in the summer. The Sun and the Moon act almost like opposites, if the Sun is high during the day, then the Moon will be low at night when it’s full, and vice versa for winter.

As we pass midsummer, Saturn will be back in the sky at night, and a little after midsummer it reaches opposition, sitting due South at midnight, the brightest it will be and the closest it is to us in the night sky. Jupiter won’t reach opposition until December, much later than 2023 when it hit opposition in November. Both Saturn and Jupiter are orbiting the Sun, but being that bit closer Jupiter does it faster, and so it will have more noticeably changed position from one year to the next. We can see that it is on the left of the Pleiades rather than on the right as it would be earlier in the year. By late 2024 we’ll have Mars in the sky as well, giving us a few planets visible together early in the evening.

Unfortunately, it is only at the end of the year that we get a good number of planets in the evening. As they disappear in the evening early in the year, it does take them a while to reappear, we’ll see them more in the morning for the early part of the year. Right at the beginning of the year we’ll have Venus and Mercury together in the morning. As sunrise gets later, these planets will get a little harder to see, and Venus in particular will be moving around the Sun in its orbit, disappearing for a while until it pops back up in the evening later in the year. We can also see Scorpius in the morning. Scorpius is one of the constellations close to where we see the Milky Way’s core in the sky. As we are starting to see Scorpius in the morning, that means the Milky Way’s core is going to start coming back into view as well. Unfortunately, when the Milky way’s core is due south at midnight, we’re very close to midsummer.

We’ll never see the Milky Way’s core in the city, not as long as cities produce this much light pollution, so we need to look out into the countryside for this brief view of the core of our galaxy, necessarily brief because it’s around the shortest night of the year. You can see the Milky Way’s core early in the morning earlier in the year, but it means staying up until closer to 3 o’clock in the morning. On the other hand, we also get a view of it in the evening once we push later into the year.

The positions of the constellations, such as Scorpius and Orion, well reliably repeat each year for centuries to come. The planets will drift on their regular orbits, putting them in different but predictable positions. Meteor showers are another regular feature of the sky. The same meteor showers occur on roughly the same night every year, the radiants of the meteor showers will remain in pretty much the same place. However, there is variation. How many meteors we will actually get can be tough to estimate. Some meteors showers run for weeks and peak for days, others run for just a few days and peak across just a few hours.

As we push through 2024, we can see how radiants drift a little across the sky, and how many meteor showers pop up. There are only a few really famous ones, and many meteor showers radiate from the same constellation. To help tell them apart, Greek letters are used to tell them apart, for example distinguishing the famous Geminids from the less exciting Epsilon Geminids earlier in the year. I won’t try to predict how many meteors each shower will produce, but some are quite reliable, such as the Perseids in August.

Lastly, Mars. Mars has come up a few times already, and we didn’t get to see much off it in 2023. We take a closer look at Mars on the 29th of December next year, as far forward as we’ll go for now, seeing the famous Tharsis Region with Olympus Mons, and the huge canyon the Valles Marineris. Of course, we’ll get to see those parts of mars in the morning much earlier in the year, so make sure to join me next time so you can see those updates as the sky changes.