Caoimhín's Content

Today, we are going to take a look into the month of October. We’ve already seen so much of the late September sky, we’re going to go a little bit into October, rather than starting on the 1st. We’re going to jump a couple of days into the month in order to see some of the interesting things that are happening. This will also make the sky a little bit more significantly different from late September, the sky that we’ve already seen so much of.

We’re going straight to sunset on the 5th of October. We still have Saturn with us almost all night long. As soon as the sky is dark enough, it will come out towards the east. Saturn is past opposition once we’re into October, so it will be with us for the majority of the night, but it will start disappearing earlier and earlier in the morning and we’ll start seeing it higher and higher earlier in the night. The summer triangle is already high in the south and the night is just beginning. The sky is starting to get dark a little bit earlier as well. There’s a fair level of darkness at just 8 o’clock. Even though there is still a little bit of a glow in the sky at 8 o’clock there are also plenty of bright stars visible, such as Arcturus, the Plough and Capella in Auriga. We are going to start seeing more and more of those wintertime constellations like Auriga coming up earlier and earlier in the night. The Moon is very close to Saturn on the 5th, and as we move later into the evening they should continue getting closer. They might set for us in Ireland before they reach the closest that they’re going to get somewhere. By removing the ground in Stellarium, we can follow them for longer and check. Thanks to this, it does seem like their paths diverge just before the Moon sets, it starts to get further away from Saturn again. It looks like their closest is just a little bit after midnight into the 6th.

We’re going to move ahead another day to the 7th, because this is going to bring us up to the Full Moon. Going ahead a day from just into the 6th brings us very early in the morning of the 7th, with the Moon about 99.9% full. If we move back a little bit earlier in the night, we’ll come back into the the 6th. This should bring us away from the Full Moon, and then hopping forwards a day brings us into the 7th again. Now the Moon is less full, just 99.3 late in the night of the 7th. It looks like we’re seeing the Moon at its fullest just after we cross into the 7th, early in the morning. This brings it to one hundred percent full at about 3:30. It’s completely dark, there’s no trace of the Sun at 3:30 in the morning, and we can see some of the more famous constellations like Gemini, Orion and Taurus. Sirius the brightest star is up, along with Jupiter. Taking a closer look at the Moon it is 100% full, which is not always a guarantee for any location, but we are seeing it 100% full from here in Ireland this time. If we take a look at the distance, we’ll have to move back a little bit to get it to its lowest. While the Moon is pretty close to 100% full, it is also pretty close to 350,000 kilometers away from us, instead of 400,000 kilometers away from us. The closest it’s getting to us is around 357 thousand and change kilometers away from us. This is close, close enough for people to call it a Supermoon. So we have this 100% Full Supermoon coming up on the 7th, but it will be closer to 100% full if you stay up the night of the 6th into the 7th.

There is something else interesting coming up with the Moon around these dates, and it was suggested to me by a commenter on YouTube. Just a reminder to anyone who’d like anything particular in the sky discussed, you can make comments and request or suggest things to take a look at. On the 12th of September we have the Moon moving in front of the Pleiades. The Moon, from the angle we have in Ireland, it isn’t perfectly occulting the Pleiades, but it’s definitely blocking out some of them. From other locations on Earth, this would almost certainly change, unfortunately, the software doesn’t seem to want to let me check, but this would almost certainly look slightly different from other latitudes. The Moon is so close to us and of course, the Pleiades are so much more distant, much more of a background object, so parallax has a large effect. The occultation is happening very early in the morning. WIth with the atmosphere turned off to make sure that the Pleiades remain visible, it’s not too hard to see. If we turn the atmosphere back on, it is still dark, once we’re that little bit later into October, it will still be dark at 6 o’clock in the morning. However, with light pollution and the light of the Moon, a lot of the fainter stars in the Pleiades are invisible. The very brightest one or two should be visible. If we move through time, we’ll see the Moon moving away from them and moving back over them. It seems that this occultation will be finishing just before or just as the Sun rises.

It is difficult to see the Pleiades without the atmosphere being taken away due to the light pollution. There would also be a difference if you were out in the countryside. Without any light pollution to get in the way a few more of the Pleiades would be visible. If you are looking at something like this with a telescope or binoculars, the Moon is going to be really bright and it is going to make the fainter stars hard to see. This is despite the Pleiades being fairly bright enough themselves, they’re still definitely a lot fainter than the Moon. Out in the countryside, there is a great view of the early morning sky. We’re going to keep moving forward, and as we do the Moon gets pretty close to Jupiter and Pollux as we come up to the 14th. If we turn around into the east coming up to morning time, Venus is there, pretty prominent for the entire month. However, it is going to get harder and harder to see as we come to the end of October, being lower in the morning sky. The Moon continues on to make a conjunction with Venus on the 19th.

We’re going to push through to the other side of the New Moon, a little bit closer to the end of October. We’re also going to come back to sunset. We’ve still got Saturn at sunset once we’re through to the 25th or 26th. The Moon has come back around to evening time as we’re past the New Moon. Unfortunately it looks like things are just at the wrong angle for us to see Mercury in the evening. The planet Mercury is coming up to its greatest elongation, and it is quite close in the sky to Mars. If we move through the days here, we can see them making a reasonable conjunction, and the Moon comes very close to all three of them on the 23rd. Mercury is coming out to its greatest elongation, but it’s very close to these other objects a few days before that. As we can tell with the angle, this is certainly not going to be visible to us here in Ireland. Even if we gradual change the time, by the time everything’s above the horizon, it’s just too bright and by the time it’s dark enough, they’re under the horizon. So for this one, we are going to hop down to a lower latitude.

We’re going all the way down to 18 degrees north. This is still pretty far off the equator, but it’s close enough that we’re going to see these things higher in the sky. They’re still only visible in twilight, and very low in the sky. We will take a look from the equator as well to double check, but I think this triple conjunction is going to be in twilight no matter where we look at them from. They are visible as it starts to get darker from 18 degrees north, but they are also getting very low in the sky. This is because they’re all quite close to the Sun and one way to tell is by how narrow the Moon is. It is a very New Moon on the 23rd, a very narrow waxing crescent. If we go a bit further south, we’ll get a better view. We want to go all the way down to the equator to see the conjunction nice and high from the horizon in twilight. They are just about visible in actual darkness, and of course, they look amazing with the core of the Milky Way up above them. The equator affords us a very different view to what we’re used to here in the Northern Hemisphere. Taking a closer look at the Moon, Mercury and Mars, they are reasonably spread out, but they are all there in a row. This is definitely something that is only going to be achievable from lower latitudes, something which we’re not going to get to see from up here in Ireland,

We might miss the triple conjunction, but we will still have the Moon passing by a lot over the course of the month. If we come all the way back around to the beginning we have the Moon passing past Saturn on the 5th, and we have our Full Supermoon coming up on the 7th. As I mentioned, just past midnight on the 6th, just going into the 7th, is when the Moon will be at its fullest, not necessarily its closest to us, but definitely its fullest. Then we’ve got this occultation of the Pleiades, really at its best just before the Sun rises, on the 12th. The Moon will continue making some pretty close passes, with Pollux and Jupiter there on the 14th and then all the way through to reasonably close to Venus there on the 19th and 20th. Then it comes back out the other side to get close to Mars and Mercury. The Moon is really, one of the more interesting things in the sky for October, where the Moon is, how close it’s getting to all of these different things in the sky and how close it gets to us. There are changes to the constellations that we’re going to see, especially once we get later in the month, but we’re going to take a look at that in a different piece a little bit later in the month once we’re into October itself.

I hope you get to see those upcoming things and I hope that you enjoyed this piece, if you did then please do like it. If you like this kind of content, then please subscribe to this website and my YouTube channel. Thank you very much for reading and hopefully I’ll see you back here next time.