The Winter Solstice takes place at 3pm on December 21.
The path of the sun across the sky is at its lowest for the year. While the sun is low, the moon rides high.
Full moon on the night of December 4-5 beams down from an altitude of 65 degrees.
Jupiter is at its best this month and next, reaching Opposition (opposite point in the sky to the sun) on January1in the constellation of Gemini.
Venus and Mars are too close to the sun this month to be seen and so Jupiter is the brightest object in the night sky apart from the moon.
A gibbous waning moon will be just to the left of Jupiter on the evening of December 7.
The constellation of Gemini also hosts the source point (known as the radiant) of the most active meteor shower of the year.
Geminid meteors can be seen for most of the first half of the month with an expected peak after midnight on December 14.
The radiant is well up in the eastern sky by late evening, and in clear skies even a watch of half an hour should yield some meteors. Geminids are relatively slow across the sky compared to most of the regular showers.
Saturn is an early evening object, due south at 6pm mid-month.
Through a telescope it looks very different to normal as the rings are almost edge-on to our viewpoint, making them hard to see.
This is the only time of the year when planets and stars can be seen in the night sky so early.
The earliest sunset is about a week before the Winter Solstice with the sun sinking below the horizon at about 3.45pm. The very thin young moon will be visible from about 4pm onwards on the 22 and the 23, low down in the south west.
In the morning, sunrise keeps getting later though December, reaching 8.05am by the last week of the month.
Before sunrise in the first two weeks or so of December, the elusive planet Mercury might be spotted, low down in the south east.
During Christmas week, Orion is due South at 11pm with Gemini and Jupiter to its upper left.
To the lower left of Orion is the brilliant star Sirius, the brightest star in the sky and the lead star of Canis Major (see map).
Sirius is close to our solar system, in astronomical terms, at a distance of 8.6 light years.
It is a white star, but from the UK is seen low in the sky where atmospheric effects can cause scintillation – causing Sirius to ‘flash’ through a range of colours including blue, red, white and green.
- James Abbott is from the North Essex Astronomical Society (northessexastro.co.uk).
