Above: Among other events to look forward to, 2025 should be excellent for more aurora with our Sun being in/just past solar max. Even lousy fish-eye lens aurora pics from the light polluted near-suburbs of Rochester with no forethought into optimizing the capture should still be completely reasonable this coming year.
The most recent issue of Free Astronomy Magazine (November-December 2024) is available for your reading and downloading pleasure in English, Italian, Spanish, French, and Arabic at www.astropublishing.com (and facebook).
Running past the finishing line for the year with a slew of exceptionally well-presented NASA, ESA, CSA, ESO, and NOIRLab articles that go from the Kitt Peak Visitor Center to Barnard’s Star to the very, very edge of it all.
Also looking into 2025 for notable space and space science missions, for which Suni and Butch's return to Earth is a major event for the household (as Suni's tour of the ISS was on our dinner playlist for months), ESA's BepiColumbo will finally settle into Mercury's orbit in early December, NASA's own Lucy will be flying by asteroid Donaldjohanson (get it?) in late April, and a bunch of other missions will be reaching milestones.
