Astronomy day 2025 is upon us! To celebrate, we’ve picked six targets to emphasize the variety and scale of objects visible in the night sky that will make for a beautiful and rewarding sight, whether you’re observing with the naked eye or a telescope.
The American Astronomical League picks one night each spring and fall for enthusiasts and experts to bring astronomy “to the people,” by holding stargazing events to engage the public in the post-sunset realm.
This year, the autumnal Astronomy Day falls on Sept. 27. Be sure to check out the Astronomical League’s website to find your local astronomy clubs and get in contact to see if they’re holding an event to mark the occasion! Alternatively, you can simply turn your eyes, telescope or binoculars skyward to hunt down the following six spectacular targets that can be found brightening the night sky in late September.
6 targets to look out for on Astronomy Day 2025
1) The moon — diameter: 2,159 miles (3,475 kilometers)
Where better to start our tour than with Earth’s moon, the rising and setting of which has been a constant throughout our lives and the lives of every human being who has ever lived. The 34%-lit lunar disk can be found 15 degrees above the southwestern horizon at sunset on Sept. 27, with the red supergiant star Antares shining close to its right amongst the stars of the constellation Scorpius.
The moon will provide a beautiful sight to the naked eye, just two days out from its first quarter phase, when its right side will be fully lit by direct sunlight. A pair of 10×50 binoculars will reveal the sprawling dark expanse of Mare Tranquilitatis marring the lunar surface close to the equator. Use a telescope with an aperture of 6 inches or more as the terminator sweeps west in the nights that follow to narrow in on the historic Apollo 11 landing site, by using the Ritter, Sabine and Moltke craters as landmarks on the southwestern shore of the Sea of Tranquility.
2) Saturn — diameter: 74,897 miles (120,500 km)
September is the perfect time to see Saturn shining high above the southeastern horizon in the hours following sunset, below the head of the Western Fish in the constellation Pisces.
The planet will appear as a bright “evening star” to the naked eye around this time, just a week or so out from opposition, while an 8-inch telescope will allow you to resolve the vast cloud bands marking the gas giant’s surface.
Ordinarily, a telescope of this size would give you a good chance of spotting the nearly 3,000 mile-wide (4,800 km) gap in Saturn’s iconic ring system called the Cassini Division. However, the gas giant‘s rings are currently oriented almost edge-on to Earth following the ring-plane crossing in March, making them look like a bright line piercing Saturn’s cloud disk through the eyepiece. Be sure to check back with Saturn on Oct. 6 for a chance to see Saturn’s largest moon Titan cast its shadow over the gas giant, though you’ll need a fairly large (8-inch) scope to be able to see it firsthand!
3) Polaris — size: 46 suns
The supergiant star Polaris is among the most famous of the myriad twinkling points of light that inhabit the night sky. Polaris, along with its smaller stellar companion, are located 430 light-years from Earth in the constellation Ursa Minor, also known as the “Little Bear.”.
It can be found by locating the Big Dipper in the constellation Ursa Major using a smartphone stargazing app and identifying the bright stars Dubhe and Merak, which form the “pouring edge” of the pan section of the famous asterism. Simply follow an imaginary line outward from Merak through Dubhe, and the next bright star you find will be Polaris.
The entire Northern Hemisphere night sky appears to revolve around Polaris, but this won’t always be the case. A slow wobble in Earth‘s rotational axis — called axial precession — has and will see the mantle of North Star handed to several other bright stellar bodies over a 26,000-year cyclical period. Read our guide to past, present and future North Stars to discover how to find them in the night sky.
4) Orion Nebula — diameter: 30 light-years
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The Orion nebula, also known as Messier 42 (M42), is a glorious stellar nursery located 1,500 light-years from Earth in the constellation Orion, the Hunter.
The nebula is easy to pick out with the unaided eye under dark skies and can be found by looking below the Orion’s Belt formation of three stars — Alnitak, Alnilam and Mintaka — which rise high above the southern horizon in the hours preceding dawn in late September.
As one of the closest star-forming regions to Earth, the Orion Nebula has come under intense observation from the astronomical community, along with flagship space telescopes like Hubble and James Webb. Protoplanetary disks have been imaged coalescing around newborn stars in the nebula, observations that haveallowed us to gain insights into the formation of alien solar systems.
5) Pleiades star cluster — diameter: 43 light-years
The Pleiades is a colossal stellar city comprised of over 1,000 bright blue-white stars that is easily visible to the naked eye from a dark-sky location as a milky patch of light. The open cluster can be found in the eastern sky around midnight in late September, glowing above the red star Aldebaran in the constellation Taurus.
Observing the Pleiades through a pair of binoculars or a 6-inch telescope will reveal dozens of energetic young stars, including the seven most prominent stellar bodies from which the cluster got its nickname of the Seven Sisters: Asterope, Celaeno, Alcyone, Electra, Merope, Taygete and Maia.
Our sun was likely born in a star cluster billions of years ago, though its stellar siblings have since dispersed throughout our local galactic neighborhood.
6) The Milky Way
Our final target is our galaxy, the Milky Way. Earth is embedded in the Orion arm, or spur of the Milky Way, which makes it impossible to view its shape from without, as we can with the neighboring Andromeda galaxy. However, astronomers have been able to deduce that we likely live inside a majestic barred spiral galaxy, based partly on the concentration of stars found along a flat region known as the galactic disk.
Head away from artificial lights in the hours following sunset in September to see the dense ribbon of stars, dust and gas representing the galactic plane of the Milky Way streaming down toward the southwestern horizon. The glowing ribbon runs directly through the bright stars of the Summer Triangle asterism — Altair, Vega and Deneb — and numerous star clusters can be seen shining in and around its nebulous expanse.
Photographers should read our guide to photographing the Milky Way, while those looking to upgrade their gear should check out our roundups of the best lenses and cameras for astrophotography.
Stargazers hoping to catch a glimpse of the planets of our solar system or the host of deep sky objects beyond should also read up on our picks of the top telescope and binocular deals available in 2025.
This has been just a tiny sampling of the treasure trove of astronomical targets that will be visible as the shifting seasons transform the night sky over the coming months. Be sure to check out our monthly sky maps to stay up to date with everything happening in the post-sunset realm.