There’s an eclipse happening! It happens September 17 at 10:12 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time. Since the Moon orbits around us at a speed of 2,287 miles an hour, it normally takes a full hour for its 2,160-mile-wide body to plunge completely into Earth’s dark umbral shadow. Tune in to hear more about what’s happening in the sky!

Some planets are easy to find in the night sky, while only one is usually difficult. That’s because Venus, Jupiter, and Mars at their closest are all brighter than any star, plus Mars has an obvious orange color. Mercury always has a distinctive position low in morning or evening twilight. But Saturn doesn’t readily stand out. Tune in to hear how you can find Saturn.

Saturn arrives at its closest point to Earth of the entire year. So let’s locate it. It’s the ONLY bright star in that entire section of the heavens. We’ll also discuss Saturn’s composition and its journey around the sun.

Once in a while, the sky offers a profusion of great beauty that happens to lie slightly below the limit of what the eye can see. That’s when you need a good pair of binoculars. Tune in to hear what phases of the moon you can expect to see.

This week we’ll see a Perseid meteor shower. But if clouds spoil the spectacle for you, there will be lingering meteors. This shower’s intensity falls off rapidly after peak, so later you might only see a meteor every 3 minutes after midnight. Tune in to hear about the reddish stars and what to check for the in the sky!

Everyone loves shooting stars. And twice each year we get famous meteor showers, when their numbers explode to very nearly one per minute. That’s what’s happening now. And these Perseids will keep intensifying until their peak a week from now.

A century ago the famed astronomer Percival Lowell believed an unknown “planet X” was gravitationally tugging on Uranus and Neptune. So the wealthy Lowell founded an Arizona observatory to try to detect this ninth planet. We’re reminded of all this because this past week is when Pluto has come to its closest to Earth of 2024.

One of the all-time lowest Full Moons you’ll ever see graces us this month, but the real fun happens a few nights from then as the “star” closest to the Moon, Saturn, is at its biggest and brightest of the entire year. Hear how to spot Saturn and why it’s hard to locate.

Bastille Day is here and we had our own Independence Day fireworks just recently as well. So speaking of explosions, unimaginable violence is up in the sky too – and keeps happening. The greatest are supernovas. Tune in to hear how these cause a star’s total destruction.

What a year we’re having. First we got to see a super-rare total solar eclipse, when the Moon completely covered the Sun. And now this week, almost as rare, the Moon will eclipse a far more distant star, a famous blue one. When a star is blocked by the Moon, it’s called an occultation, and it rarely happens to one of the few truly bright stars that happen to be positioned along the Moon’s path.