Stargazing and skywatching from Cosmic Herald — what to see in the night sky, meteor showers, planets, auroras, and observing guides.
Four mornings, Sept. 6-9: a thinning crescent Moon slides past Mars in Gemini, then Jupiter in Cancer, while a C9-flare CME due Sept. 8 puts a "maybe" on high-latitude aurora ahead of the Sept. 11 new Moon.
Read the story →NOAA logged repeated S1-minor proton storm alerts on September 5 as a coronal mass ejection from sunspot AR4524 heads for Earth, with arrival expected September 8 and a shot at G1-level auroras.
NASA's September 2026 sky guide runs from a modest meteor shower and a string of Moon conjunctions to Venus's peak brilliance, the fall equinox, and a Harvest Moon sharing the evening with Saturn and Neptune.
A waning gibbous Moon slides past the Pleiades this week, sets up a close pass with Jupiter on Sept. 6, then briefly occults the giant planet on Sept. 8 for skywatchers in Canada, the contiguous U.S., Greenland and Russia.
September 2026 stacks a Moon-Jupiter pairing, Venus's brightest night of the year, a dark New Moon, the precise equinox moment, and a Harvest Moon passing Saturn into one easy month of naked-eye skywatching.
A newly confirmed classical nova in Sagitta, V488 Sge, has brightened to magnitude 7.42 and is one of at least four novae visible simultaneously this unusually active season.
A sprawling, magnetically tangled sunspot let loose an M7 flare and a run of CMEs, prompting a G2 storm watch whose aurora timing may or may not line up with this week's partial lunar eclipse.
A faint periodic comet has now blown up twice in 2026, brightening thousands-fold and turning into a binocular-visible green fuzzball that astronomers still can't fully explain.
From August 22-26, 2026, watch the waxing gibbous Moon slide past the Teapot and into Capricornus while Venus edges toward Spica and Jupiter, Mars, and Saturn stack up in the morning sky.
A bright streak filmed crossing the partially eclipsed Sun from Spain on August 12 looked like a made-for-astronomy Perseid meteor — until NASA's APOD team checked the numbers and found an airplane contrail instead.
Venus hit its widest separation from the Sun on August 14-15, 2026, blazing at magnitude -4.3/-4.4 low in the west near the crescent Moon and Spica, with a half-lit telescopic disk visible into late September.
A filament eruption on the Sun has launched a coronal mass ejection toward Earth, and NOAA forecasters expect a glancing blow late Aug. 17 that could push aurora into the northern-tier U.S. and similar latitudes down south.
Free daily briefing — missions, discoveries, and what's overhead tonight.
You're in. ✓
Check your inbox to confirm your subscription.No spam. Unsubscribe any time. Read our privacy policy.
