2025 was a great year for stargazers, skywatchers and astronomers, because almost every month there was something exciting and special to see.
As a new year begins, a new calendar of night-sky events beckons. Some things, like planet parades, full Moons and eclipses we can predict with pinpoint accuracy.
Other events like aurora displays, solar storms and comets, we can't predict with similar exactitude. Perhaps that's what makes observing the night sky so thrilling.
As the end of the year approaches and 2026 is on the horizon, these are my top ten most memorable stargazing moments of 2025.
3 January – Moon and Venus spectacular in the evening sky
As the New Year began there was a beautiful conjunction on view in the west after sunset. On the evening of 3 January, the slim waxing crescent Moon was shining so close to Venus, just two degrees below it, that the pair were a striking sight to the naked eye.
Even those who weren't regular stargazers were captivated by its beauty.
Binoculars and the low power eyepieces of telescopes gave lovely views of the unlit part of the Moon’s face glowing with the lavender hue of Earthshine too.
January/February planet parade
At the start of 2025 there was a huge fuss being made on social media about a 'parade of planets', a rare opportunity to see most of the planets in the Solar System lined up in the sky, all visible at the same time.
There was some truth in this: Mars, Jupiter, Uranus, Neptune, Saturn and Venus were all in the evening sky at the same time, but stretched out in a long, long line across it from east to west, and not bunched up together like very misleading graphics showed.
Timing was key if you wanted to see them all at the same time, and of course several of the planets were not even visible to the naked eye.
But nevertheless, the 2025 planet parade – or planet alignment – made the mainstream: it felt like every newspaper, website and breakfast news programme was covering it.
Most importantly of all, it got lots of people outside and looking up at the sky.
The March eclipses
In March 2025, we were treated to two eclipses: a lunar and a solar eclipse.
On the morning of 14 March 2025 a total lunar eclipse graced the morning sky, but unfortunately for us in the UK it reached its peak just as the Moon was setting.
That made it very hard to see, as the Moon dropped behind trees and buildings.
Just over two weeks later, on the morning of 29 March 2025, a partial solar eclipse was visible.
Observers blessed with clear skies were able to see a large bite taken out of the top of the Sun by the Moon (using proper solar observing equipment of course).
May – searching for Saturn's rings
At the end of March 2025, Saturn’s rings vanished. Not really, of course: they were still very much there, but they seemed to disappear as the planet’s tilt tipped them edge-on as seen from Earth.
This event, known as a Saturn ring plane crossing, reduced the rings to appearing like a razor-sharp line across the planet’s butterscotch disc.
Unfortunately Saturn was too close to the Sun in the sky to allow observers to enjoy this bizarre and rare event, but by the end of May Saturn had pulled far enough away from the Sun to be visible in the morning sky, and we got our first look at the shrunken rings.
Summer noctilucent clouds
While many skywatchers go into a kind of enforced hibernation in summer, because the season’s late sunsets and early sunrises mean the night sky never gets truly dark, many others look forward to it because that’s when noctilucent clouds appear.
These 'night shining' clouds only form in the summer months, and in the summer of 2025 there were some major displays that painted the northern sky with beautiful streamers, whirls and swirls of bright silvery blue clouds.
August – two worlds meet before dawn
In the middle of August many sleep-deprived skywatchers set their phone alarms for 'You’re having a laugh o’clock' to go out and enjoy a quite spectacular planetary conjunction in the pre-dawn sky.
At the start of the month Venus and Jupiter were more than ten degrees apart, but they moved closer each morning, until they were less than a degree apart on the morning of 12 August 2025.
Observers blessed with clear skies were able to see the two planets shining so close together they looked like a bright 'double star' to the naked eye, and were a stunning and memorable sight in binoculars.
September total lunar eclipse
Many eclipse-watchers who had missed the March lunar eclipse due to its ‘challenging’ circumstances looked forward to trying again on the evening of 7 September 2025, when another total lunar eclipse would occur.
Unfortunately this one was even more challenging than March’s, as in the UK the Moon rose at sunset already in full eclipse, making it very hard to spot in the still-bright sky.
Hopefully eclipse-watchers will have a less frustrating time in 2026, when a partial lunar eclipse is due to happen on 28 August.
October – Comet Lemmon
When it was discovered, comet A6 Lemmon looked like it had the potential to become a naked-eye comet in the 2025 autumn evening sky, and it didn’t let us down.
By the middle of October 2025 it was a lovely sight, shining below and to the left of the Big Dipper/Plough, easily visible to the naked eye as a long, faint smudge.
The view through binoculars was simply gorgeous, showing a tail around ten degrees long stretching away from the comet’s bright head.
November – interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS visible to amateurs
Contrary to the deranged gibbering on social media, comet 3I/ATLAS, only the third object from another Solar System detected as it passed through ours, is just a big chunk of ancient, dirty ice and not an alien spaceship.
In late November 2025, backyard amateur astronomers finally got their first clear views of the comet as it moved out of the Sun’s glare and up into the morning sky before sunrise.
Although it was little more than a tiny, tail-less misty smudge on camera images and through telescopes, it was still a thrilling sight.
December – big aurora displays to end the year
With two huge displays of the Northern Lights, 2024 was a fantastic year for watchers of the aurora.
And although 2025 didn’t see repeats of those stunning light shows, as the end of the year approached there were several displays that delighted many skywatchers.
The display on the evening of December 3rd was beautiful, and bright enough to be seen even through the glare of an almost full Moon.
What were your favourite stargazing and astronomy events of 2025? And what are you looking forward to in the 2026? Let us know by emailing contactus@skyatnightmagazine.com
