Bakersfield Night Sky — September 5, 2026
The Fall schedule of shows at the William M Thomas Planetarium is now posted. We’re going to start my final semester of doing planetarium shows with the ever-popular Black Holes on September 17. This semester we’ll also be showing “Beautifica” on various Fridays/Saturdays. “Beautifica” is the next show in the sequence of James Hood music presentations that follows “Mesmerica” which we’ve been showing for the past year or so.
Included in the Fall schedule is the show I created, “How Big? How Far?” that is a tour of the solar system but unlike the usual solar system tour shows, this one has us fly from one planet to the next and we learn about the distances between the planets along the way. It is still the most requested of the morning field trip shows but I have not shown it for the evening public shows in quite a while. In my final semester I want to have an evening showing. Some of the shows will be given by my successor, Dr. Lucas McClure, who will take over as director of the William M Thomas Planetarium in the spring semester.
Well, I was grumbling a bit on the evening of August 27 as I was getting pictures of the lunar eclipse from my Oregon brothers while we had cloudy skies in Bakersfield. Usually, the weather conditions are the reversed! I am glad that they got to see it, though.
In the late night sky for the first part of this week, you’ll see a thin waning crescent moon passing near Mars and Pollux in Gemini and then bright Jupiter in Cancer. Tonight, well after midnight, the moon will be above Mars. The moon will become visible first, rising in the east around 1:45 a.m. followed by Mars at about 2:25 a.m. Tomorrow night a thinner crescent moon will be below Pollux, the left twin of the Gemini twins. Both of them will be visible rising in the east at about 3 a.m. In the pre-dawn morning of September 8, you’ll see the moon right next to bright Jupiter with both of them becoming visible by about 4:30 a.m. Those in the states from Colorado and farther east will be able to see the moon cover up (occult) Jupiter in the daytime if they use their binoculars. Those of us in the Pacific coast states won’t be able to see it. A better occultation of Jupiter will happen in October.
The moon will be at new moon phase on September 10, so we’ll begin to see a thin waxing crescent low in the west shortly after sunset by about September 12 at the earliest. Shortly after sunset on September 13, you might be able to see the moon form a nice-looking triangle with Venus and the bright star, Spica. Venus will be to the left of the moon and Spica will be to the right of the moon.
That weekend is the Dark Sky Festival at Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks. The Sequoia Parks Conservancy puts on this annual festival, celebrating the starry splendor of a dark sky and the wonders of astronomy. Events begin on Friday, September 11 and continue through September 13. The most popular part of the festival is the star party hosted by the Kern Astronomical Society on Saturday night, September 12. Kern Astronomical Society members will have their telescopes set up in the large parking lot behind Wuksachi Lodge for you all to take a look between 8 and 10 p.m. Park at the Lodgepole Campground parking area and take the shuttle to Wuksachi that will operate between 7:30 and 10:30 p.m. Pray for clear skies! Go to sequoiaparksconservancy.org/dark-sky-festival for the schedule.
NASA’s next large space telescope, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, had a successful launch last Sunday. It will take about three months to reach its final orbit around the second Sun-Earth Lagrange (L2) point, 930,000 miles away from Earth in the direction opposite the sun. On its way to L2, the instruments will be activated and aligned. Hopefully, we’ll be reveling in the First Look Observations by the end of November.
Roman is going to help us figure out the role of black holes, dark matter, and dark energy in forming and shaping galaxies, galaxy clusters, and superclusters by surveying large swaths of the sky. Although it has a mirror the same size as the Hubble Space Telescope, Roman’s field of view is over 100 times larger than Hubble’s. Roman will be surveying the universe in the near-infrared band instead of Hubble’s UV and visible band (the one we can see with our eyes).
At the L2 point, Roman will join the European Space Agency’s Euclid space telescope that is also surveying the sky to help us figure out the nature of dark matter and dark energy in a complementary manner. Euclid’s survey size is about seven times larger in area than Roman’s and Euclid is observing in the visible and near-infrared. Since Roman’s mirror is twice the diameter of Euclid’s, Roman will be able to see deeper (farther into the past) than Euclid can.
In addition to the cosmology study that will take up about 75% of Roman’s time, Roman will also be testing out improved coronagraph technology to search for exoplanets in our galaxy. Coronagraphs are used to block the light of stars, so that we can pull out the much fainter signal from reflected starlight off exoplanets orbiting the stars. An exoplanet the size of Earth orbiting at the same distance from a sun-like star as we are from the sun will be about ten billion (that’s 1 followed by 10 zeroes) times fainter than the star in the visible band. In the infrared the contrast ratio is a bit better with the Earth-size exoplanet “just” a million times fainter than the star.
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Director of the William M Thomas Planetarium at Bakersfield College
Author of the award-winning website www.astronomynotes.com
