What’s up in the night sky: November 2025

Welcome to our night sky monthly feature, where we focus on easy and fun things to see in the night sky, mostly with just your eyes. This month: planets throughout the month, and a mostly mediocre, sometimes great, meteor shower with a good publicist.

All month:  Yellowish Saturn is up in the east in the early evening, moving west and setting in the wee hours of the morning.

All month: Very bright Jupiter rises in the late evening in the east, and is high overhead before dawn.

Early in the month: Super bright Venus is very low in the predawn east, but still visible early in the month if you have a clear view of the eastern horizon.

Nov. 2: The Moon is near yellowish Saturn

Nov. 5: Full Moon. This will be the biggest so-called supermoon of 2025. The Moon will appear about 8 percent bigger and 16 percent brighter than an average full Moon. The Moon’s brightness and size in the sky vary from one full Moon to the next because the Moon’s orbit is not totally circular, so the Moon appears bigger when it is in the closer part of its orbit.

Nov. 10: The Moon is near very bright Jupiter.

Nov. 17-18: The Leonids meteor shower peaks. Though it tends to get a lot of publicity, this shower is usually pretty mediocre with 10 to 15 meteors per hour from a dark site. Once in a while, when Earth passes through a dense part of the debris left by Comet 55P/Tempel-Tuttle, this shower can produce hundreds of meteors per hour. Next predicted meteor storm like that is 2099 — bummer. But 2031 and 2064 may reach 100 meteors per hour, or there is always the possibility we’ll be surprised even this year. But if you’re going to meteor watch once during the next couple of months, make it the Geminids in mid-December.

Nov. 20: New Moon

Nov. 29: The Moon is somewhat near Saturn.