Enough fooling around. You’d like to see something amazing. A celestial spectacle that doesn’t require a telescope or star chart.
Your quest is almost over. But first a familiar caution: The internet is an ocean of misinformation. Almost every website urges you to look for an upcoming event that doesn’t exist. True, if you go to the website of NASA, the NWS, or my magazine, the Old Farmers Almanac, you’ll get reliable astronomy advice. But most internet sites belong to people wanting clicks and followers. They know a sensational headline will pull people in. Lately it’s gotten out of hand.
If you’ve been on the web this month you were told that all the planets would meet in a line. And that a super meteor shower would bring 100 shooting stars each hour. That we’d see a ‘Blood Moon’ eclipse followed by a solar eclipse. None of it was real. Neither of those eclipses were visible from anywhere in North America. The Perseid shower on August 12 was drowned out by a nearly full moon and reduced to a few skimpy streakers per hour. And the “planetary lineup” amounted to a meeting of just two visible planets, with a third hovering in a distant part of the sky.
But let’s snap back to reality — because currently there actually is something to see. And our Hudson Valley has indeed been periodically treated to celestial fireworks. Freed from big city lights, we’ve had several genuine spectacles since this Night Sky column first appeared a half century ago. There was the breathtaking Comet West in March of 1976. There was a brilliant, rapid-motion, full-sky aurora that lasted all night long on March 13, 1989. There was an unbelievably intense meteor storm on November 18, 2001. And for those willing to drive three or four hours, there was last year’s total solar eclipse, the greatest visual sight a human can ever experience.
Each was staggeringly stunning. If you lay on a backyard lawn chair between 3 AM and dawn on November 18, 2001, you were awestruck by seven brilliant, vividly green meteors each and every minute, under cloudless skies! But though this page offered advance warning the week before, many didn’t set an alarm and slept through it, and there’s often no second chance. The next such meteor storm that might be visible from here will happen in the autumn of 2099, 74 years from now. And the next “darkness at noon” over our 124xx zip code will unfold on May 1, 2079.
Of course, there’s a total solar eclipse somewhere in the world most years. You could catch one on August 12, 2026 from parts of Spain. But forget overseas. Let’s stay focused on the Hudson Valley and the upcoming week. There’s no imminent super-spectacle but we do have a single striking apparition.
For those willing to get up early, you can look toward the east at 5:30 a.m. starting tomorrow morning. Gaze out your east-facing window, the direction toward the impending sunrise, any morning this weekend through Tuesday. You’ll see a vertical line of three bright planets between 5:15 and 5:35 a.m. The only challenging one is the lowest, Mercury, for which you need an unblocked flat horizon with no obstruction from trees, houses or hills. Far above it is the brightest “star” in the whole sky, the dazzling planet Venus. And continuing upward from Venus stands the second brightest starlike object, the planet Jupiter. If you lack an unobstructed eastern view, you’ll still easily see blazing Venus and Jupiter, which alone may justify an early wake-up.
Okay, this inconvenient conjunction is not a great comet or a swarm of bright shooting stars. But it’s quite nice. And most importantly, it’s actually real.
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