Hello there fellow stargazers!
Has the cooler air and shorter days started to impact your inner-autumn flow? You walk into your local coffee and pastry shops and they are offering wonderfully pumpkin-spiced beverages and pumpkin deserts, and we start to crave apple pie, warm deserts, and warm beverages as the colder nights creep in.
The walk-in closet becomes transformed as long sleeve shirts and sweaters make a come-back. Millions of new clothes combinations become available!
So, as the full moon rose this past week, have you noticed the beautiful golden hue about it? It has been a rich treasure to behold. The September Full Moon is the well-named Full Corn/Full Harvest Moon. The staple fall crops of corn, pumpkins, squash, beans, and wild rice are ready for harvest. Kind of gets you thinking about Thanksgiving already!
Farmers can work later into the night with the light of the moon shining down upon them; the week of the autumn equinox the Moon rises about the same time each night, versus 50 minutes later as usual. Try timing the moon rise this weekend to see if this holds true for you!
In other horizons, I have been glad to have the somewhat clearer skies of September to start to pull out my "Big Daddy" telescope into the driveway and start to spy the late summer and early fall deep sky objects. I have been trying to view the recently discovered supernova which lies in M51, the Spiral Galaxy, yet have still have not seen it! The first few nights of this past week it was cloudy and raining, and the last few clouds have obscured the night by about more than half. I do enjoy the slow-down and cooling of the weather, however I would really like the chance to catch a view of M51 before the Big Dipper ends up too far below the horizon.
So, with the telescope out, I decided to view the tried and true deep sky object of the bejeweled Butterfly Star Cluster in between the tail of Scorpio and the spout of Sagittarius. I was not disappointed; it is an easy find even with a pair of binocular or even a keen pair of eyes as a white smudge on a dark moonless night.
Next time we will seek out and finish with the Zodiac with the constellations of Aquarius and Pisces. These are the two most obscure constellations in the night sky, and an exercise in patience with the reward of tracing them out on the Fall horizon being some pretty killer bragging rights!
Be Well until then!
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