Bakersfield Night Sky — September 19, 2026
Venus is now at peak brightness as the evening star blazing away low in the southwest sky after sunset. Through a telescope you’d see Venus as a crescent that will get thinner as the nights go by. Although, less than half of Venus’ day side is facing us (and that fraction is shrinking), Venus is also getting closer to us as it catches up to Earth. Eventually, there will be too little of the dayside facing us to keep getting brighter despite its close distance to us. Venus will be at peak brightness for most of this week.
Later this week you might be able to spot Mercury low in the west just after sunset. On the night of September 25, Mercury will be right next to the bright star Spica of Virgo but Mercury will be brighter. They will both easily fit together in your binoculars with Mercury to the upper right of Spica.
Three days before that (September 22) is the official start of our season of fall (autumn) with the autumnal equinox. The sun crosses the celestial equator, the projection of Earth’s equator onto the sky, at 5:05 p.m. PDT, heading southward. As the sunlight hits our part of Earth at shallower angles and the daylight shrinks, the average temperatures will lower. I say “average” because we know in Bakersfield that we can still get temperatures in the 90s in October!
Tonight a waxing gibbous moon is in the Teapot part of Sagittarius. Sagittarius is in the direction of the Galaxy’s center which is why the milky band part of the Milky Way is larger in that direction. Tonight the bulge part of the Galaxy is south at 8 p.m. but you do need to get outside of the city, away from the street lights, to see it. Just off the spout of the Teapot is the exact center of the Galaxy with a large supermassive black hole residing there. Although the black hole is 4.5 million times the mass of the sun, the Milky Way is over a hundred thousand times more massive than that. My web search found a comparison of the mass of a AA battery or a tea bag with an adult elephant would be the same ratio as the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole and the rest of the Galaxy. If the black hole vanished, the orbit of the sun and our solar system in the Galaxy would hardly change at all.
To the right of Sagittarius in the early evening is Scorpius with brilliant orange-red Antares at its center. To the left of Sagittarius is the much dimmer Capricornus. Above Sagittarius and Capricornus is Aquila with much of the constellation in the milky band of the Milky Way. In the left side of Aquila is the bright star Altair in the eagle’s neck.
All of the individual stars you can see without binoculars or a telescope are within a few thousand light years of Earth, so they are all within our galactic neighborhood. The Milky Way Galaxy is about 100,000 light years across. Altair is very close at just slightly less than 17 light years away. All of the stars that make up the Teapot part of Sagittarius are less than 350 light years away. Red supergiant Antares is slightly over 550 light years away and most of the stars that make up the Scorpius pattern we see are closer than that. The star Girtab (Iota Scorpii) at the far left end of Scorpius’ tail is 1930 light year away. If it was at the same distance as Antares, it would appear brighter to our eyes than Antares. However, Antares actually puts out more energy overall than Girtab because Antares radiates most of its energy in the infrared instead of the visible band we see with our eyes.
On September 26, the full Harvest Moon will be above Saturn. With the super-bright moon, you may need to block the moon with your thumb to first spot where Saturn is but after you know right where to look, you can pick it out below the moon. At the end of the month, September 29 and 30, a waning gibbous moon will be to the right and left of the beautiful star cluster at the shoulder of Taurus, the Pleiades, respectively.
Tickets are now on sale for the two shows about the next destinations of in-person exploration, the moon and Mars. Mars One Thousand One plays on October 1 and Moon Base plays on October 15. I hope to see you at one or both of the shows!
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Director of the William M Thomas Planetarium at Bakersfield College
Author of the award-winning website www.astronomynotes.com
