planet

If you're hearing this on Sunday, Saturn is at its closest point to Earth, and its rings appear as a straight white line due to their edge-on alignment — a rare event that occurs every 15 years during its equinox. Earth’s own equinox arrives Monday at 2:10 PM, marking the start of autumn in the Northern Hemisphere. This equinox often falls on the 22nd or 23rd because, as Kepler explained, Earth speeds up in its orbit when closer to the sun in January and slows down in July. That means winter is shorter than summer by about a week — a fact disguised by our calendar and the uneven placement of long and short months.

For centuries, the full moon guided calendars and celebrations — and its legacy lives on. This weekend, we explore how lunar cycles still determine the timing of some holidays. Ever wonder why Easter moves around or why there's always a full moon during this time. It all comes down to ancient rules and celestial rhythms that still shape our holidays today.

When darkness first falls these nights, the sky’s brightest star hovers in the west. This is the planet Jupiter. And just above it is a truly awesome object. It’s the twisted remains of one of the greatest start explosions. Tune in to hear how it could possibly be reached and what exactly happened.

For anyone with a telescope, Saturn is a knockout. Check out the magnificent rings! Once every 50 years those rings are angled towards us and the sun. This spring is Saturn’s equinox, so it’s time to celebrate.

The Northeast U.S. is now in its single season that’s cloudy and windy, which might remind us of worlds where no breeze has ever stirred, where dust lies flat for billions of years. That’s what the Apollo astronauts saw. Tune in to hear about the characteristics of the planets: Mercury, Earth, Venus and of course we’ll talk about the Moon.

On Mars, the curiosity rover's methane-sniffing instrument turned up nothing at all — dashing hopes of finding bacteria, which can produce methane. The search was inspired by Martian ancient history — since it was a very different place in the distant past. Hear how we’re still looking for life elsewhere.

With the current Moon a thin crescent that sets before nightfall, we can be thinking about dark skies and the Northern Lights. Of course, it’s the Sun’s activity that controls the aurora, not our calendar, so if a strong solar flare or even more powerful coronal mass ejection blasts tons of the Sun’s charged particles in our direction, we’ll likely get auroras a couple of days later. Tune in to hear about the aurora avalanche!

The constellation Cancer, which is out these nights near the Moon and the bright planet Jupiter, contains a smudgy object called the Beehive cluster, which was noted throughout history as a blob. Yet people with normal eyesight can gloriously split it into individual stars. Tune in to learn how.

Despite all the media attention focused on various full Moons – like saying it’s the wolf Moon or strawberry Moon or what-have-you, there are really only two officially recognized Full Moons. There’s the Harvest Moon, which is the Full Moon closest to the autumn equinox, and there’s the next Full Moon after that – the Hunters Moon. And That’s what we’re seeing this week.

These nights the first few hours after nightfall let us see the brightest part of our galaxy. The next night it’s clear, you’ll find the Moon is absent. So if you’re away from city lights and you let your eye dark adapt for a few minutes, you’ll see the creamy glow of the Milky Way right overhead, splitting the sky in half from north to south. Tune in to hear what you need to catch that perfect glimpse of the stellar night sky.