Caoimhín's Content

Today’s video, we are looking into January. We’ve already look a little into January, with New Year’s morning, but now we’re looking into the month proper to see what is going to come up.

Now that we’re looking into 2025 by more than a couple of hours, the Moon is after moving past new, it’s after coming into its next cycle. The Moon’s cycle is measured usually from being new, so the Moon is just a few days old here, where as the Moon is 29 and a half days old as it moves in front of the Sun. January starts with a nearly New Moon, so it’s Full Moon will be close to the middle of the month. The Half Moon will be roughly in between Jupiter and Saturn. We may not get to see perfect half here in Ireland, just as we don’t always get to see a perfect one hundred percent Full Moon from any given location on the Earth.

Venus is getting closer to its greatest elongation once we’re a little bit later in January, and Mars is coming a little bit closer to its opposition in the sky. When anything’s at opposition, it rises as the Sun sets, sets as the Sun rises. That means that when the Moon is full and Mars is close to opposition, they’re going to be very close together as well. We’re also able to see Mars and Venus in the sky together that bit earlier. I think it was 7 o’clock on New Year’s Eve, and now that we’re just a week into the new year, it’s just 5:45, so you can do this significantly earlier.

It’s still nice and dark at 7 o’clock in early January and the planets are clearly visible in the sky. Of course, the light of the sort of Half Moon will go as we come up to morning time and it sets. Coming up to morning brings Mercury into the sky, but only for the first few days of the month. Mercury’s motion around the Sun is of course, much, much quicker than Venus’s. Just a week after it’s comparatively easy to spot position on New Year’s Day morning, just a week later and you’ve got only about 10 or 15 minutes to catch it at all.

Pushing ahead to the middle of January, and Mercury’s gone from the morning sky, but of course Mercury will be back in the evening soon. We’re starting to see Scorpius nice and clearly in the morning while the sky is still reasonably dark. You could see Scorpius as the sun rose on Christmas Morning and the morning of New Year’s Day, but it is now visible even earlier. By the middle of the month we will have the Moon and Mars incredibly close together. I wanted to check if there was an occultation and it looks like it at first glance, after zooming in to double check, they don’t quite align. Not from Ireland anyway, potentially from another location on Earth. However a close conjunction is still cool, and may be even better in terms of photography, because Mars and the Moon look so incredibly close together.

Taking a closer look at Mars while it’s this close to the Moon however, you won’t be able to get that much detail. The Moon is so much closer to us than Mars, so seeing both at the same time, especially all of the Full Moon, reduces Mars to an orange spot. Taking a very close look just at Mars, and it is looking great, we can see both of its ice caps. We’re almost looking straight down on Mars equator, with the Valles Marineris, the largest canyon in the solar system, facing the Earth when mars is behind the Moon. Coming back just a few days earlier will bring the Tharsis region into view, with Olympus Mons the largest dormant volcano. Of course Mars is fantastically interesting, and very close to opposition. It’s illuminated 99.9%, but I’m only seeing it at 99.9% illuminated, not 100%. It is a little bit annoying, but these things happen occasionally, as I said, we don’t always get to see things 100% from here in Ireland. Potentially, Mars is 100% when it’s visible over a different part of the planet. However, due to how long planets remain around opposition, I find this unlikely, and I may not be seeing it for some other reason. Just using the naked eye, it looks like an occultation of Mars by the Moon, but not from here in Ireland. When we are a little bit closer to the middle of January, I may travel closer to the equator, to see if it actually lines up as an occultation anywhere.

As I have mentioned in the past as well, we don’t always get to see every occultation. As occultations happen about as quickly as eclipses, given that it depends primarily on the motion of the Moon around the Earth, you don’t always get to see them from every location on Earth. Just like an eclipse can be limited to North America, a particular occultation be be limited to only Europe.

Late in January, it should be easy to see Mars, Jupiter, Venus and Saturn in the sky together. Venus and Saturn get particularly close, they slide right past each other as Saturn continues around the Sun while Venus pushes out to the side of the Sun towards it’s greatest elongation. Even at the end of January it doesn’t look like we’re seeing Mercury in the evening from here in Ireland. When Mercury does come back around to the evening sky in early February, it will join the other planets. Mercury and Saturn will appear next to each other just after sunset, and this will be difficult to see from here in Ireland. It will be a lot easier from closer to the equator and from the countryside. If you do manage to see it, Mercury will be just above the Sun, next to it will be Saturn, then Venus, Jupiter and Mars. Uranus will still be up, quite close to Jupiter in the sky, with Neptune just a little higher than Saturn. All of the planets, all of the planets that are visible to the naked eye will be visible at the same time in the near future if you are in a favorable enough location. However, Satrun and Mercury will be quite difficult. Thankfully the other three, Venus, Jupiter, and Mars, are very easy to see.

Mars being with us for the entire night over the course of January will give us plenty of opportunities to observe Mars in detail and nice and closely. Unfortunately, it looks like very close to the night of opposition is going to be around the Full Moon. If we go a little bit earlier in the month, the Moon will at least set. allowing for some extra darkness. A good way to check if something is at opposition is to see if it is directly above the South at midnight. With Mars in close conjunction with the Full Moon, it’s opposition is likely around that date. This is also about as high as Mars it’s going to get. It would be a little bit better if Mars hit its opposition closer to midwinter because it would be even higher in the sky thanks to the angle of the ecliptic, but unfortunately that’s not the case.

Mercury will definitely gone from the morning sky once we’re through to the 20th. I always intend these pieces to be a sort of Cliffs Notes or Cliff Notes of the upcoming month, intentionally brief. Incidentally, I didn’t know if it was Cliff Notes or Cliffs Notes because I’ve never actually used them, I’ve only heard about them on TV. I did of course know roughly that they’re a short explanation of something. It turns out that the brand name for a particular series of summaries of literature is CliffsNotes from Clifton’s Notes. However, when being used as a turn of phrase, it seems either is fine.

We do have a couple of meteor showers coming up in January. The Gamma Ursa Minorids are a minor shower coming a little bit later in the month. The Quadrantids are variable, but could produce 60 to 200 when they peak on the 3rd of January. This is coming up early in January, soon after this is posted. It looks like we’re really getting a zenith early rate of 21 to 69 just after sunset on the third. This goes down as we get later, but early in the morning of January 3rd, the rate is even lower. The Quadrantids have the potential to be a pretty good meteor shower, especially if you’re under a dark sky. In true darkness it seems to be hitting a rate of 70. A zenith hourly rate of 70 would be fantastic. Stellarium also shows a local hourly rate, of just 4-14. We not getting as many as we potentially could, but they will be added on to the background 10 or so an hour coming from the antihelion.

With the Quadrantids, Mars coming to opposition, Venus coming to its greatest eastern elongation, and of course a new year, we have various exciting things coming up in 2025 as a whole. Mercury is still there in the morning early enough in January, so there are going to be a few more opportunities to catch Mercury in the morning if you didn’t manage to catch Mercury on New Year’s morning or on Christmas morning. With all of the other planets, they’re going to continue to get easier and easier to see at sunset in the evening pretty much until we get into February. January is going to continue to be a great time to see the planets, and February will still be a great time to see the planets.

On the 4th of January, the Moon and Saturn are nice and close together. With so many planets in the sky, there’s even more opportunities for occultation, and this is one we get to see from here in Ireland. On the 4th of January at just about 6 o’clock, Saturn will be behind the Moon. The occultation of Saturn is often an impressive one, this time we’ve got Saturn coming in from the illuminated limb of the Moon here, which isn’t as cool in my personal opinion as the alternative. Of course, cool is subjective, but I think watching Saturn disappear into what seems to be nothing, the dark limb of the Moon that we can’t see, watching Saturn essentially blink out of existence like that is just a little bit cooler. Of course, seeing Saturn here essentially set behind the Moon is also very cool. Earlier with Mars, it was tough to see any details on Mars while we were also looking at the Moon. Here we can see the Sea of Tranquility, and the rings of Saturn at the same time, which is really cool. Of course there’s Titan as well, and a few of Saturn’s moons could be visible if you observe this occultation through a telescope.

Looking it in reverse may give you an idea of the version that I sort of prefer, with Saturn disappearing behind the invisible nighttime portion of the Moon, rather than emerging form it as it will this time around. I think that is a little bit cooler, but an occultation is cool no matter which way it goes. We’ve got that occultation, but I don’t think we’ll get an occultation of Jupiter, the Moon is too high off of the ecliptic. Or Jupiter is too low underneath it, of course there’s variation in both cases there. At least we have the occultation of Saturn, that’s something we can look forward to quite close to the beginning of January.

I hope you enjoyed this quick look ahead into January, I do apologize that I didn’t get it posted before January actually began, but with Christmas and New Year’s at the end of December, there were some interesting dates to focus on. Hopefully I will get my preview of February up before February begins. If you did enjoy this piece, please do like it, and if you’d like to see more content from me in 2025, then please do subscribe to this website and my YouTube channel. Hopefully I’ll see you back here next time.