Regular Stargazing Sessions 2025

ECLIPSE continued its tradition of regular stargazing sessions throughout 2025, running from 7 PM into the early hours of the morning for the IIIT-B community.

What Happens at a Session

Each session is part observation, part education. Participants get hands-on time with the club’s telescope while learning practical skills that carry over to a lifetime of sky-watching:

• Telescope operation — from initial setup and polar alignment to tracking moving objects
• Observation planning — how to choose the best nights based on seeing conditions, moon phase, and what’s in season
• Sky map reading — navigating by star charts and identifying constellations in real time
• Celestial navigation — using bright stars and planets as anchors to find fainter objects

What We Observed

Across the year’s sessions, participants were treated to views of:

• Venus in crescent phase through the telescope
• Jupiter and its four Galilean moons — visible as small dots alongside the planet
• Saturn with its rings clearly resolved
• The Orion Nebula (M42) — a diffuse glow of star-forming gas even in urban skies
• The Pleiades (M45) — the Seven Sisters cluster, stunning even in binoculars
• The Moon in detail — craters, mountain ranges, and the boundary of the terminator

Notable Night: Geminid Meteor Shower (December)

ECLIPSE made another attempt at the Geminid meteor shower, observing across three nights in mid-December. Though clouds disrupted two of the nights, the clear window on December 14th delivered — participants lay out under open skies and watched meteors streak overhead throughout the night.

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Organized by ECLIPSE Astronomy Club, IIIT Bangalore.