Adrian Dening's Stars Over Somerset

Saturday, 6 September 2025 11:34

Monday 8th to Sunday 14th September 2025

We will have had a Full Moon on Sunday 7th, so if you pop outside around 9pm on Monday 8th and look towards the east, you will see a 98%-lit waning gibbous Moon rising above the horizon, extremely close to Saturn. The gas giant will be just below and to the right of the Moon.

I wouldn't bother bringing your telescope outside as, being so close to a Full Moon, the light pollution from it makes for poor viewing of those elusive faint deep sky objects.

One deep sky object that is always easy to spot though is the Pleiades open cluster of stars, also known as M45 in the Charles Messier catalogue and often called the "Seven Sisters" because of the seven prominent stars that can be seen with the naked eye.

If you look towards the east north east at 9pm on Friday 12th, a slightly gibbous Moon will have just risen above the horizon and as it does so, the Moon occults (or appears to pass in front of) the Pleiades.

The Pleiades is the closest Messier object to us and is only 440 light years away. The bright blue stars that you see are relatively young and it is estimated that the cluster formed about 100 million years ago. If you are looking at them, remember that you will be seeing the stars how they were 440 years ago, as the light from them has taken that long to reach us, travelling at the speed of light, which is 186,000 miles per second!

The stars are gradually drifting apart and in around 250 million years, the group will no longer be classed as a cluster, rather individual stars.

www.starsoversomerset.com

Screenshots courtesy of Stellarium