Welcome to the University of Texas Skywatchers Report for Monday September 14th through Sunday September 20th.

The new moon for the month of September is early on Thursday the 17th so we’ll have a waning crescent moon for the first half of the week and a thin waxing crescent moon low in the west after sunset this weekend.

Mercury is setting at 8:30 p.m. at midweek, about an hour after the Sun. The very thin crescent moon will be to the upper right of Mercury on Friday evening.

Jupiter and Saturn are up in the south at 9 p.m. Jupiter will set a little after 2 a.m. and Saturn will set at 2:45 a.m. this week.

Mars is rising at 9:10 p.m. this week and is visible for the remainder of the night.

Venus is rising at 4:00 a.m. this week as it slowly moves back towards the sun and its next conjunction in spring 2021.

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.