What’s Up: August 2025 Skywatching Tips from NASA

Jupiter and Venus shine brilliantly in the morning as they seem to be grazing in the sky the 11 and 12th. The Perseids are swept away by the Moon.

All month – visibility of the planet:

• Mercury: Go out over the horizon in the second half of August. Seems very low, below 10 degrees of altitude.
• Venus: Shine very brilliantly east every morning before sunrise, about 20 to 30 degrees above the horizon.
• March: Can be observed low to the west during the hour after sunset, appearing roughly as shiny as the brightest stars of the Grande Dipper.
• Jupiter: Appears east every morning, with Venus, but much less brilliant.
• Saturn: Observable late at night at dawn. Gets up around 10:30 p.m. at the start of the month and around 8:30 p.m. by the end of the month. Find it high in the south as sun rise.

Skywatching protruding facts:

August 11 and 12 – Conjunction Venus -Jupiter – The two most brilliant planets have a narrow meeting over several days, appearing closest to two days the 11 and 12th, only a diploma.

August 19 and 20 – Moon with Jupiter and Venus – A thin lunar growing joins Jupiter and Venus – still relatively close to the sky after their conjunction. They appear in the east within several hours preceding sunrise.

August 12 to 13 – Perseids Peak – The famous annual meteor shower will be hampered by a moon of 84% in the peak night. Some brilliant meteors can still be seen during the hours before dawn, but vision conditions are not ideal this year.

All month – the dumbbells (M27) – One of the easiest planetary nebulae to observe, M27 appears in the star model of the summer triangle, above high level in the first half of the night.

What’s new for August? Jupiter and Venus have a morning meeting, we check the shower of this year’s Perseid meteor and take a look at the future of our own sun.

Mars is the only planet in the sky at the start of the evening this month, visible low to the west for about an hour after the sky begins to darken. It is only about 60% as brilliant as it appeared in May.

Saturn increases around 10 p.m., and you will see it appear a little earlier every evening over the month. You will find it in the east after nightfall with the Cassiopeia and Andromeda constellations. The anchored planet goes towards the western part of the sky by dawn, where the first elevators will find it in the morning in August.

The real highlight of August is the narrow approach of Jupiter and Venus. They shine east before sunrise throughout the month. The pair begins the month further, but quickly approaches in the sky. They appear at their closest to the 11th and 12th – only about a degree of interval. Their appointment occurs in a context of shiny stars, notably Orion, Taurus, Gemini and Sirius. A thin crescent moon joins the pair of planets after their separation, the morning of the 19th and 20th.

One of the best annual meteor showers, the Perseids, culminates during the night on August 12 and until the 13th. Unfortunately, this year, the moon is almost full at peak night, and its reflecting everything except the brightest meteors. Although it is not so great for Perseid observers, the good news is that another favorite shower of meteors, the Geminids, is ready for a moonless vision in December.

August is the ideal moment to see one of the easiest nebulae to observe in the sky.

The dumbbell nebula, also known as M27, is a height above August evenings. It is a type of nebula called “planetary nebula”.

A nebula is a giant cloud of gas and dust in space, and planetary nebulae are produced by stars like our sun when they become old and nuclear fusion ceases inside. They blow from their external layers, leaving behind a small hot remaining called white dwarf. The white dwarf produces a lot of shiny ultraviolet light which illuminates the nebula from the inside, because the gas expansion shell absorbs UV light and radiate as a visible light.

The dumbbell nebula, nicknamed for its dumbbell shape, appears as a small plot of light light about a quarter of the width of the full moon in binoculars or a small telescope. It is in the summer triangle, a model of stars that are easy to find above the August sky. You will find the nebula for about a third of the path between its brilliant stars Altair and Deneb.

Hoping that you will have the chance to observe this overview of the future that awaits our sun in about 5 billion years. This is part of a cycle that sowed the galaxy with the ingredients for the new generations of stars and planets – perhaps even others not too different from ours.

Here are the moon phases for August.

You can stay up to date on all NASA missions exploring the solar system and beyond Science.Nasa.Gov. I am Chelsea Gohd from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory of NASA, and that’s what’s going on this month.