What are some skywatching highlights in September 2023?
What’s Up for September? Venus returns to the morning sky, the Harvest Moon, and in search of zodiacal light…
After brightening our evening skies for most of this year, Venus has now switched over to being a morning sky object. Look for the superheated, cloud-covered planet as a bright beacon in the eastern sky before sunrise throughout the month. It will appear fairly high in the sky from the Northern Hemisphere – reaching 30 to 40 degrees above the horizon by month’s end, depending on your latitude.
Meanwhile,
The full moon on September 29th will be the fourth and final supermoon of the year. As we mentioned in last month’s video, supermoons are full moons that occur when the Moon is near the closest point in its orbit around Earth.
This month’s full moon is also known as the Harvest Moon, being the closest full moon to the September equinox. This is around the time when lots of crops in the Northern Hemisphere reach their peak. The harvest moon provides a few days of bright moonlight right after sunset, which traditionally helped farmers have a bit more time to bring in their crops in advance of the first frost.
On cool, moonless September mornings before dawn, you might have an opportunity to search for the zodiacal light. It’s a triangular or cone-shaped pillar of faint light that stretches upward from the horizon, and it’s easiest to observe around the time of the equinoxes in March and September.
The zodiacal light is sunlight reflecting off of an interplanetary dust cloud. This dust fills the inner solar system out to the inner fringes of the main asteroid belt, just past
And speaking of asteroids, we’ll soon have opportunities to study one here on Earth, when