Bob Berman

This is the time of year when the Milky Way splits the sky from north to south, and passes straight overhead. If you can get to the country next week, when the bright Moon will be gone, you'll see it in all its glory.

The autumnal equinox is here. It means Earth is now angled sideways to the sun. Since neither pole is tipped toward the Sun, days and nights should be equal. The main equinox event, other than declaring it the start of fall, is that the sun rises exactly in the east and sets precisely in the west, not southeast or northwest or anything else. The Sun is now more accurate than any compass.

Neptune's single strangest feature are its bizarre winds, the fastest in the known universe, which blow with five times the speed of tornados. Tune in to hear about the blue, gassy planet, and how it is now at its brightest and closest of the year.

This week our eyes face the most concentrated part of our Galaxy. If it's clear, and you’re away from city lights, September's crisp air allows the Milky Way to emerge in all its glory. That’s because our own galaxy’s disk is now perpendicular to the horizon so that it crosses the entire sky and passes straight overhead.

The moon now has its strangest appearance. Several nights this week the moon will be in a lunar phase, the only one whose shape is not universally known. Everyone can identify a crescent or half or the full moon. But now we have a gibbous moon. That's the phase fatter than half but smaller than full.

Saturn wins the Miss Universe contest. For anyone who's ever seen it through a telescope, there are hardly any runners-up. Of course the big question is always where and when to look. Well, the when is right now, the next few weeks. The "where" is in the east early each night, and then in the south, in the constellation Aquarius.

The high sun’s weather effects still linger. Winter's typical sheets of stratus clouds and overcast lie months in our future, while puffy. Convective cumulus clouds caused by rising pockets of warm air, are still the norm. And we still experience the fact that air's capacity to hold moisture is 10 times greater now than it is in early spring and fall. So, unlike the dry air we typically get in mid-September, late August can still bring muggy conditions.

This week we’ll learn about Venus’ ferocious winds, just how slow the planet spins, and how the carbon dioxide bubbling planet could perfectly line up with the Sun.

Here they come. Already the midnight sky is ablaze with three or four times more shooting stars than normal. Each night their numbers increase. Tune in to hear how the spectacle of the summer meteors has begun – and will keep intensifying until its peak Saturday night, August 12.

We’re all on the lookout for nature’s patterns. The most obvious are solar rhythms — like the recent solstice. Civilizations all paid attention to solar patterns because their food production depended on it. Next in line were the Moon’s rhythms, mostly that its phases repeat every 29.5 days. This week we cover the rhythms of the universe!