The Evening Sky in September 2024
Venus is the brilliant ‘evening star’, appearing in the west soon after sunset. It sets around 8 pm at the beginning of the month and around 10 pm NZDT at the end. The Moon will be close to Venus on the 5th. Spica, the brightest star in Virgo, will be near Venus on the 19th.
Saturn is the only other naked-eye planet in the evening sky. It looks like a medium-bright star midway up the eastern sky. Any telescope will show the planet and its ring. The ring is nearly edge-on, so Saturn looks like a ball with a spike through it. Titan, Saturn’s biggest moon, is in an orbit that goes out to five ring-diameters each side of the planet. Since we are looking at Titan’s orbit nearly edge-on, it can appear close to the planet. It will be near Saturn on the 2nd, 10th, 18th and 26th. Saturn is at its closest for this year: 1,300 million km away. The Moon will be near Saturn on the evening of the 17th.
Bright stars shine around the skyline. Arcturus is in the northwest, setting early. Canopus, the brightest star in the sky (not counting Venus), skims along the southern skyline. Both stars are shining through a lot of air which makes them twinkle colourfully. Canopus, being white, shows all colours like a diamond. Orange Arcturus twinkles red and green. Canopus is matched on the northern skyline by Vega, the second-brightest northern star after Arcturus. From northern Aotearoa the star Deneb can be seen near the north skyline. It is the brightest star in Cygnus the Swan.
Orange Antares, northwest of the zenith, marks the body of the Scorpion. The Scorpion's tail hooks toward the zenith like a back-to-front question mark. It is the 'fishhook of Maui' in Māori star lore. Below or right of the Scorpion's tail is 'the teapot' made by the brightest stars of Sagittarius. It is upside down in our southern hemisphere view.
Midway down the southwest sky are 'The Pointers ', Beta and Alpha Centauri. They point down to Crux the Southern Cross. Alpha Centauri is the third brightest star. It is also the closest of the naked-eye stars, 4.3 light-years* away. Beta Centauri, along with most of the stars in Crux, is a blue-giant star hundreds of light-years away.
Above and right of Saturn is the medium-brightness star Fomalhaut, marking the Southern Fish. Further right, in the southeast, is Achernar. It is the same brightness as Saturn and the third brightest of the stars in the south after Canopus and Alpha Centauri.
The Milky Way spans the sky from north to south. It is brightest and broadest overhead in Scorpius and Sagittarius. In a dark sky it can be traced down past the Pointers and Crux into the southwest. To the northeast it passes Altair, meeting the skyline right of Vega. The Milky Way is our edgewise view of the galaxy, the pancake of billions of stars of which the sun is just one. The thick hub of the galaxy, 27 000 light years away, is in Sagittarius. Dust clouds near us appear as gaps and slots in the Milky Way. Binoculars show many clusters of stars and some glowing gas clouds in the Milky Way.
The Large and Small Clouds of Magellan, LMC and SMC, look like two misty patches of light in the south sky. They are easily seen by eye on a dark moonless night. They are galaxies like our Milky Way but much smaller. The LMC is about 160 000 light years away; the SMC about 200 000 light years away.
On moonless evenings in a dark sky the Zodiacal Light is visible in the west. It appears as a faint broad column of light extending up past Venus and Spica and toward Antares. It is sunlight reflecting off meteoric dust in the plane of the solar system.
Jupiter is in the morning sky (so not on the chart.) It rises after 2 a.m. at the beginning of the month and around 1:20 NZDT at the end. By dawn it is in the north, the brightest ‘star’ in the morning sky. It shines with a steady golden light. Mars rises about an hour after Jupiter. It looks like a medium-bright orange star. The Moon will be below Jupiter on the 24th and below Mars on the 26th.
*A light-year (l.y.) is the distance that light travels in one year: nearly 10 million million km or 10^13 km. Sunlight takes eight minutes to get here; moonlight about one second. Sunlight reaches Neptune, the outermost major planet, in four hours. It takes sunlight four years to reach the nearest star, Alpha Centauri.
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