Bakersfield Night Sky — October 17, 2026
Venus is now too close to the sun on our sky to see it as the “evening star”, especially with the haze layer that always hugs our horizon. Venus will be at inferior conjunction, in between us and the sun, on October 23-24. At the end of the month, we might begin to see Venus in the pre-dawn sky as the “morning star” but definitely by the second week of November. Mercury is now dropping back quickly toward the sun. Mercury will be at inferior conjunction on November 4. By the end of civil twilight, Mercury will probably be lost in the haze layer, so our only evening planet is Saturn. Look for it low in the east after sunset below the Great Square part of Pegasus. It’ll be the brightest point in the eastern sky.
The moon is at first quarter tonight. On the night of October 21/22, the moon will be a waxing gibbous phase already above the horizon at sunset, up highest due south at 9:30 p.m., and setting by a little after 3 a.m. That night is the peak of the Orionid meteor shower that results from Earth plowing through the dust trail left behind by Comet Halley. The grain-of-sand sized pieces of the comet hit our atmosphere at 41 miles/second (147,600 mph) burning up several tens of miles above the ground. The radiant of the meteor shower is in the upper left corner of Orion, very near the feet of the twin Pollux on the left side of Gemini. That’s where the meteors appear to streak from but the better view is usually about a quarter-circle turn from there because from that perspective, the meteors will be moving sideways across the sky instead of coming more towards us along the line of sight. That means you’ll want to be facing towards Saturn instead of Orion. Looking north toward the Little Dipper of Ursa Minor or the “W” of Cassiopeia will also work too. The nights before and after the peak will also produce a lot of meteors.
Tonight, you’ll see Mars rising in the east at about 1:35 a.m.. Mars is now just left of the heart of Cancer. Jupiter will be first visible in the east at about 2:30 a.m.. It is now moving toward the front of Leo. Those times for Mars and Jupiter will still be valid for the peak of the Orionids. The moon will be at full phase on the night of October 25/26.
This year’s Physics Nobel Prize was awarded to Francis Halzen, the principal investigator/visionary leader of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory that operates deep in the ice at the South Pole. It is a huge detector—a cubic kilometer of 5160 digital optical modules on 86 cables (60 modules per cable) deployed at depths between 1450 meters and 2450 meters below the surface.
Neutrinos are neutral (zero-charge) particles of very low mass traveling at nearly the speed of light that aren’t blocked by matter. Right now, there are trillions of neutrinos produced in the nuclear fusion reactions at the core of the sun passing through your body every second and, no, it doesn’t matter if it’s at night, since the neutrinos pass right through the Earth! Very high-energy neutrinos, millions of times greater energy than the neutrinos from nuclear fusion reactions, can be produced by supernovae and the super-hot, warped spacetime regions around the supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies. If we can detect the neutrinos, they can provide unique information about their sources that regular charged particles such as protons, neutrons, and electrons or photons of light cannot.
Neutrinos are not perfect ghost particles, though. Every now and then a neutrinos will hit an ordinary particle of matter and cause some sort of reaction that we can detect such as a flash of light or a shower of other particles. “Every now and then” means waiting about 100 years for a neutrinos to interact in a human-sized detector. To increase the detection rate, you need really BIG detectors. At a cubic kilometer, IceCube meets that criteria! IceCube is designed to look at the very rare high-energy neutrinos coming from well outside the solar system, even beyond the Milky Way. Other neutrino detectors much smaller than IceCube have focused on the lower energy, more plentiful neutrinos from the sun.
The glacial ice at the South Pole is a very clear, pure, and stable transparent material. The enormous pressures deep in the ice layer have forced out the air bubbles in the ice making it ultra-transparent. Burying the instruments that detect the flashes of light from the neutrino interactions very deep into the ice, shields the detectors from radiation at the Earth’s surface.
Francis Halzen got the Nobel Prize in Physics because he dreamed up the idea and proved that ice could be used to detect high-energy astrophysical neutrinos. He led the international team that conducted science through a technological tour de force. The Nobel Prize recognizes that imaginative, innovative work.
Tickets are on sale for the November 5 showing of “Dynamic Earth” and the November 19 showing of my show “How Big? How Far?” at the William M Thomas Planetarium. As with all of our regular evening shows, the presentation will include a tour of the evening sky with our Chronos star projector. Always, clear dark skies there!
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Director of the William M Thomas Planetarium at Bakersfield College
Author of the award-winning website www.astronomynotes.com
