Stargazing in North Texas: Supermoons, Eclipses, and Sky Events This Fall

The sun, stars and moon have fascinated humanity since the dawn of time. Whether it be the Grecian stories seemingly written by the stars, or some planetary retrograde explaining why your ex-boyfriend called you after five years of silence, we’re always talking about the sky and the imaginary things that belong above.

“For as long as humans have been around, there has been a ton of interest in space,” said McKenna Dowd, coordinator for the University of Texas at Arlington Planetarium. “We all share the same sky, sun and moon.”

If your social media feeds were flooded with novice stargazers’ amateur pictures of a supersized moon over the weekend, it’s because the North Texas night skies are especially spectacular right now, and it’s not ending anytime soon. In October, NASA identified the fourth as the best night to look up at the alleged cheese ball in the sky.

“You can see something called the Terminator Line, which divides the part of the moon covered in shadow and the part of the moon reflecting sunlight,” said Dowd. “That shadow line helps really exaggerate a lot of details in the craters on the surface of the moon. It's an excellent time to do some moon-gazing.”

On Sept. 7, there was a total lunar eclipse, or a blood moon, named for the reddish hue cast by the shadow of the sun perfectly positioned over the Earth and onto the moon, above the Eastern Hemisphere. By the time the moon circled over Big D, it was the normal, albeit extremely large, full moon that marks the beginning of the corn season, or the Harvest Moon. The last blood moon over Dallas was in March, though it didn’t attract nearly as much fanfare as the total eclipse that attracted out-of-towners and wiped out the entire city’s sunglass stock last April.

Either way, once-in-a-blue-moon astronomical events get the people going, to say the very least. Whether or not we go to sleep under the same stars and wake to the same sun as our ancestors from thousands of years ago seems to have little impact on the unfading excitement. But there’s an urban, and somewhat sobering, explanation for why the sky never seems to get old, according to Aaron Smith, a physics professor at the University of Texas at Dallas.

“Before light pollution from cities, people had easy, regular access to a truly dark, star-filled night sky,” Smith said to the Observer in an email. “However, today, many students in our physics and astronomy courses have never even seen the Milky Way. This makes the rare, obvious spectacles, like solar and lunar eclipses, feel especially dramatic, and public interest naturally ebbs and flows around such headline events.”

Dowd agrees.

“We all often forget what's up there until you have a really big event that you can see that [isn’t impacted by] light pollution or where you necessarily are,” she said.

For those whose spatial curiosity goes beyond the occasional eclipses that happen a few times a decade, here’s a list of upcoming astronomical events.

Saturn and Neptune To The West

For the next few months, the moon will be joined in the night sky by Saturn and Neptune. Saturn is visible to the naked eye on an especially dark night, right next to the moon at 10 p.m., but you’ll need a telescope to see its rings. Keep the telescope out if you want to see Neptune, the furthest planet, about 2.8 billion miles away, because it requires more than a good squint to see.

Epsilon-Perseid Meteor Shower

The Epsilon-Perseid meteor shower is a much lesser version of the August Perseids meteor shower, which lights up the night sky with up to 50 meteors an hour. The Epsilon-Persied meteor shower only produces about five meteors per hour, but for the passionate novice astronomers, it’s still worth heading to a designated dark place with a scope.

September Supermoon

On Sept. 10, the moon will be at the closest point to Earth on its orbit, called a perigee moon. All night, Reunion Tower will have a rival big, bright, beautiful ball in the sky. Dowd still recommends moon-gazing on Oct. 4, this year’s International Observe the Moon Night, as selected by NASA.