At that time, the ecliptic longitude of the sun will be 225° – extremely close to the double star Zubenelgenubi in Libra (the Scales). In modern times, observers of Samhain celebrate on November 1 – but the true mid-point of autumn will occur on November 7. Astronomically speaking, samhain is one of the four cross-quarter days, the season midpoints that occur halfway between each solstice and equinox. It actually originated from Samhain, a festival observed by the ancient Celts and Druids to mark the end of harvest season and the beginning of winter weather – pagan Thanksgiving, if you will. Halloween, or All Hallows’ Eve, has been pinned to the date of October 31 every year. Read on for your Skylights!ĭon’t forget to set your clocks back an hour next Sunday, November 1! Meanwhile Mars continues its splendid evening showing, Jupiter and Saturn shine during early evening, and Mercury joins Venus before dawn. With mid-autumn arriving, the evening moon will take centre stage around the world this week as it waxes from first quarter to a full blue punymoon on Halloween. Contact me through AstroGeo.ca, and we’ll tour the Universe, or the Earth’s interior, together! I can bring my Digital Starlab portable inflatable planetarium to your school or other daytime or evening event, or teach a session online. To see the pictures more clearly, right-click and save them to your computer, and to subscribe to these emails please click this MailChimp link. You can also follow me on Twitter as Unless otherwise noted, all times are expressed in Eastern Time. Feel free to pass this along to your friends and send me your comments, questions, and suggested topics. Here are your Astronomy Skylights for the week of October 25th, 2020 by Chris Vaughan. Michael’s Flickr galleries of wonderful astro-images can be viewed online here. The image on the right will very closely conform to the appearance of the full moon on Halloween night – when the moon will actually be about 10 hours past full – causing the craters along the eastern (right-hand) limb to exhibit some shadows. These images of the full moon by Michael Watson of Toronto perfectly illustrate the size difference between a perigee “supermoon” and an apogee “punymoon”.
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