Welcome to the University of Texas Skywatchers Report for Monday September 28th through Sunday October 4th.
The first full moon for the month of October is on Thursday the 1st so we’ll have a waxing gibbous moon for the first half of the week and a waning gibbous moon for the second half of the week. This full moon is the one closest to the northern hemisphere Autumnal Equinox so it is the one traditionally known as the Harvest Moon.
Mercury is at greatest elongation on October 1st and is setting about an hour after the sun that evening.
Jupiter and Saturn are high in the south at 8 p.m. this week. Jupiter is setting at 1:15 a.m. at midweek followed by Saturn at 1:50 a.m.
Mars is rising at 8:05 p.m. at midweek and has reached magnitude -2.5 in brightness and 22.5 arcseconds in size as it moves towards closest approach with the Earth next week. Mars will be a little over half a degree from the moon on Friday evening.
Venus is up in the pre-dawn skies at 4:20 a.m. and will be near the bright star Regulus for most of the week and the pair will be about a tenth of a degree apart on Friday morning.
In space anniversaries this week, Thursday October 1st marks 10 years since the launch of the Chinese Chang’e 2 lunar probe. The spacecraft orbited the moon for 8 months, completing its primary mission. In June 2011, Chang’e 2 left lunar orbit and a couple of months later reached the L2 Lagrange point. The following year, the spacecraft left L2 and performed a flyby of the asteroid 4179 Toutatis. The probe has continued to test China’s deep-space tracking system and will come close to Earth again 2029.
All public viewing events on UT campus telescopes are on hold for the remainder of 2020. We will update the website outreach.as.utexas.edu with a new schedule when we are able to resume viewing.
While you’re waiting for in-person telescope viewing to resume, you can tune in to McDonald Observatory live streams from west Texas. You can view past events on the McDonald Observatory YouTube channel and you can follow the observatory on Twitter, Facebook and at McDonaldObservatory.org to be notified of future events.
Thank you for calling the University of Texas Skywatchers Report.
