The autumnal equinox, which officially marks the beginning of fall, is on Tuesday at 6:31 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time. This happens when the geometric center of the sun’s disk crosses the celestial equator heading southward. With such a precise definition of the equinox, we can pinpoint down to the minute when the equinox occurs.

On the equinox, the night is approximately equal to the day and the amount of night is approximately equal all over the planet, “approximately” because the sun is not a pinpoint object on our sky but a sizable ball and Earth’s atmosphere causes some bending of the sun’s light. Sunrise is when the top of the sun pokes above the horizon and sunset is when the top of the sun drops below the horizon. In Bakersfield, the true 12-hour daylight will be on Friday. 

Two nights after the autumnal equinox, the waxing gibbous moon will be to the right of Jupiter and Saturn and on Friday, it will be to the left of the pair. The moon will be at full phase on Oct.1, so September missed having a “blue moon” by just one day. On Oct. 2, the nearly full waning gibbous moon will be just below Mars but Mars should still be visible next to the moon because the planet is so bright.

A recent piece of astronomy news posited that Jupiter could have 600 or so moons. This number comes from extrapolating from the 45 moons a team of astronomers from University of British Columbia, Vancouver, discovered in one region near Jupiter. These moons are tiny, as small as 800 meters or so across, so should they really be considered moons? They are probably captured asteroids that got pulled in by Jupiter’s gravity.

In other news, a privately funded Breakthrough Listen project is looking for signs of extraterrestrial technology signals in radio surveys of the sky. The $100 million, 10-year project has bought up more than 20 percent of the time on the two largest steerable radio telescopes in the world: the 100-meter Greenbank Telescope in West Virginia and the 64-meter Parkes radio in New South Wales, Australia.

The project also taps into the data stream from other radio astronomy studies, looking for possible signals from extraterrestrial intelligent civilizations. It is also looking at the nearby stars with exoplanets in the habitable zones of their stars found by the TESS mission for signs of brief nanosecond optical laser pulses directed toward us, pulses that could emit more light than the star the ET orbits in the brief time of the pulse.

There is some grumbling in the astronomy community that the millions in private funds should be directed toward more surefire efforts of looking for basic biosignatures on exoplanets. Many astronomers are putting their hopes in either the Large UV Optical Infrared Surveyor (LUVOIR), a giant 15-meter space telescope, or Habitable Exoplanet Observatory (HabEx), a smaller mission that uses one spacecraft with a 4-meter mirror and another spacecraft with a star shade the size of a football field that will block the light from stars to reveal the super-faint Earth-sized exoplanets orbiting near the bright stars.

If approved, such space observatories wouldn’t be launched for another decade at least. The billionaire philanthropists funding the search for extraterrestrial intelligence projects don’t want to wait that long (e.g., Yuri Milner for Breakthrough Listen and Franklin Antonio for PANOSETI, another optical laser search project). They’re willing to spend their spare millions lying around on the higher risk but higher reward projects. I hope we do eventually find another civilization we can communicate with.

Speaking of potential signs of life, last week large quantities of phosphine were reported in Venus’ atmosphere. That much phosphine can result from microbial life living in the clouds — where the temperatures and pressures are much nicer than the surface, although still pretty nasty — or from some sort of geologic process that we still need to figure out. Conclusive answers will require more observations, including up-close, in-situ probes and a lot of critical study by other research groups!

Clara Sousa-Silva, one of the co-authors of the study, welcomed the scrutiny of the peer review process of science that makes the scientific method such a powerful technique: “My science tells me the detection is true, but it’s pretty wild. I hope that everyone will get their models running and try and find alternatives that explain this. I have reached the limits of my knowledge and welcome the rest of the scientific community to join in the fun.”