2025 in review

 

Let me just say right up front that 2025 was a very difficult year for me, personally. It may have been even worse than the year of the COVID-19 pandemic. But I won't go into the details of why 2025 was so horrible for me. This blog is not about my personal life. It's about my life as a backyard astronomer. And ironically, even though 2025 was lousy in many respects personally, it turned out to be my best year of astronomical imaging.

In my first blog of 2025, I gave a report of my imaging performance in 2024. It was pretty good. At least I got as many imaging nights (282) in 2024 as I got in the previous year. And I found 5 supernovae in 2024, which was an improvement upon the 4 that I came across in 2023. But 2024 was my fourth year in a row in which I wasn't able to achieve 300 nights of imaging. It seemed that my current location in Tucson was not as good for astronomy as my old house on the west side. After all, in each of the years from 2017 to 2020 at my former residence, I got 300+ nights of imaging.

But 2025 was a gonga year for astronomical imaging nights! I was able to finish 2025 with 316 nights of imaging, one less than my all-time record of 317 nights in 2017. Not only that, but I found 6 supernovae in 2025, more than I've found in any year back to 2016, when I started searching for supernovae. As if that's not enough reason to celebrate, I made 12,554 galaxy comparisons in 2025, which is the most comparisons I've made in any year.

Why was 2025 such a good year for me in terms of backyard astronomy? 

I suppose it was mostly due to the La Niña weather pattern. We had a very dry start to our year here in Arizona. From January through the end of April, we had only 11 days of rain, totaling .79 inches of rainfall. Yeah, that's pretty much a drought! But for astronomy, it was fantastic! I got 31 nights of imaging in January, 25 nights of imaging in February, 25 nights of imaging in March, and a perfect score, 30 out of 30 nights in April! And for the first time ever, I shot more than a thousand galaxies per month in the first quarter of the year!

In order to get 300 nights of imaging per year, I need to average 25 nights per month. Here in Arizona, I can get 25 nights of imaging in most months, but my problem children are February, July, and August. Since 2021, I often wasn't able to get even 20 nights of imaging in these months. In fact, 2022 was so bad that I got only 4 nights of imaging in July, and 2 nights of imaging in August! That created such a huge deficit of imaging nights that I couldn't make up for it in the other months. In fact, in 2022, May was the only month when I got more than 25 imaging nights (it was a perfect score, 31).

In 2025, I never had less than 20 nights of imaging per month. That was also a first for me. But getting 20 nights of imaging or more, per month, doesn't necessarily mean that I can shoot more galaxies. For instance, in July, August, and September of 2025, I was not able to shoot 1,000 galaxies per month. Summer nights are shorter than the nights of other months. But summers in Arizona constitute our annual monsoon season. We typically get clouds and thunderstorms almost daily during the monsoon season. However, it sometimes clears up after midnight. If I stay up after midnight in monsoon season, I may be able to pick up an imaging night, but only for a couple of hours. So, it's difficult to shoot as many galaxies per night in the summer than it is for the rest of the year.

All in all, 2025 was an excellent year for supernova hunting. But, as I alluded to earlier, it was not a good year for rainfall. I measured a total of 8.33 inches of rain in my backyard rain gauge this year. Compare that to the 12.56 inches I measured in 2024, and the 14.45 inches I measured in 2023. 

Interestingly, the annual number of rainy days in 2025 (there were 53) wasn't much different than the number of rainy days in 2024 (55) or 2023 (63). We just didn't get as much rain per day in 2025, compared to previous years. 

Note that, if you add my total number of imaging nights (316) in 2025, to the total number of rainy days (53) we had, it comes out to more than 365. So, yeah, there were several nights in 2025 when I was able to roll out the telescope and shoot some galaxies, even though it rained earlier in the day. But by and large, on the nights when I wasn't imaging, it was raining. 

Here's hoping that El Niña continues in 2026!



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