Your Guide to 2025's Celestial Moments

The new year will bring a pair of lunar eclipses, but don't expect any sun-disappearing acts like the one that mesmerized North America last spring. While the world will have to wait until 2026 for the next total solar eclipse, the cosmos promises plenty of other wow moments in 2025. Here's a sneak peek of what's ahead, from the AP:

• Planet parade. Six of our seven neighboring planets will line up in the sky to form a long arc around mid-January. Little Mercury will join the crowd for a seven-planet lineup in February. All but Neptune and Uranus should be visible with the naked eye just after sunset, weather permitting. Five planets already are scattered across the sky—all but Mars and Mercury—though binoculars or telescopes are needed to spot some of them just after sunset. "People should go out and see them sometime during the next many weeks. I certainly will," said the Planetary Society's chief scientist Bruce Betts.

• Eclipses. The moon will vanish for more than an hour over North and South America on March 14, followed two weeks later by a partial solar eclipse visible from Maine, eastern Canada, Greenland, Europe, Siberia, and northwestern Africa. The cosmic double-header will repeat in September with an even longer total lunar eclipse over Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia, and a partial solar eclipse two weeks later near the bottom of the world.
• Supermoons. Three supermoons are on tap this year in October, November, and December. The full moon will look particularly big and bright those three months as it orbits closer to Earth than usual. November's supermoon will come closest, passing within 221,817 miles.

• Northern and Southern lights. The sun burped big time last year, painting the sky with gorgeous auroras in unexpected places. Space weather forecasters anticipate more geomagnetic storms that could yield even more northern and southern lights. That's because the sun has reached its solar maximum during its current 11-year cycle that could continue through this year.
• Meteor showers. The Perseids and Geminids are perennial crowd-pleasers, peaking in August and December, respectively. But don't count out the smaller, less dramatic meteor showers like the Lyrids in April, the Orionids in October, and the Leonids in November.

(More astronomy stories.)