What's up in the night sky: July 2025 Intermediate shadowing lesson
This is NASA/JPL-Caltech's What's Up video for July 2025, a guide to the night sky that month. It covers Mercury after sunset, Mars in the evening, Venus in the morning and the eagle constellation high overhead. The narration is clear and full of time and place phrases, which suits intermediate shadowing.
- Intermediate
- Video
- 3:27
- 34 sentences
Practise it in the app
Free, no account needed. The app plays one sentence and waits for you to say it.
The sentences
What's Up for July?
Mars shines in the evening sky, sixty years after its first close-up, Venus brightens your mornings, and the eagle soars overhead.
First up, Mercury is visible for a brief time following sunset for the first week of July.
The video has 34 sentences. The rest are in the app. Practise them all
Words and phrases
- shines
- gives out bright light
- evening sky
- the sky in the early part of the night
- close-up
- a picture taken from very near
- brightens
- makes brighter
- soars overhead
- flies high above you
- First up
- first, to begin with
- visible
- can be seen
- following sunset
- after the sun goes down
How to practise this clip
Listen for the names Mars, Venus and Mercury, and the time phrase for a brief time following sunset.
- Listen to a sentence before you read it.
- Say it right after, at the speaker's pace, with the same pauses.
- After the first round, hide the text and practise from the sound alone.
Source
NASA/JPL-Caltech, What's Up, on YouTube