A beautiful thin waning crescent Moon was high in the southeastern sky as I saw my wife off to her second day of school this morning. The Moon will be lower and thinner at 6:00 AM for the next couple days.

After dusk, the splash of planets across the southeastern sky continues to be free from the glare of the Moon this week; Jupiter will only be visible for a couple weeks before disappearing behind the Sun.

Venus is very low above the southwestern horizon, and Jupiter appears higher and a bit towards the south at dusk.

The Moon
The Moon is a waning crescent, visible in the eastern sky before dawn. The Moon will be new on September 9th. Next week the Moon will reappear in the southwestern sky as a waxing crescent at dusk.
Observing Target: M92 – The Other Cluster in Hercules
“Messier 92 is a globular cluster of stars in the northern constellation of Hercules. It was discovered by Johann Elert Bode in 1777, then published in the Jahrbuch during 1779. The cluster was independently rediscovered by Charles Messier on March 18, 1781 and added as the 92nd entry in his catalogue. M92 is at a distance of about 26,700 light-years away from Earth.
M92 is one of the brighter globular clusters in the northern hemisphere, but it is often overlooked by amateur astronomers because of its proximity to the even more spectacular Messier 13. It is visible to the naked eye under very good conditions.”
~ From Wikipedia
In a small telescope, M92 appears as a small puff-ball of stars:
The Hubble Space Telescope shows M92 to be a beautiful swarm of hundreds of thousands of stars:

The Sun
The Sun has been spot-free for 7 days. The huge northern coronal hole remains from last week; a couple smaller holes appear along the equator. There is no sign of a coronal hole at the south pole. Some coronal loop activity appears between the equatorial holes. The solar wind speed is 487.6 km/sec, with a density of 5.5 protons/cm3.
SpaceWeather.com says: “A fast-moving stream of solar wind is approaching Earth. Estimated time of arrival: Sept. 7th. The gaseous material is flowing from a large hole in the sun’s atmosphere. Arctic sky watchers should be alert for auroras later this week.”
Several rather nice prominences appear all over the Sun in the last couple days. The region of coronal loop activity shown above appears as the bright orange region on the equator in the animation below.
You can create your own time-lapse movies of the Sun here: AIA/HMI Browse Data.
You can browse all the SDO images of the Sun from 2010 to the present here: Browse SDO archive.
Asteroids
Upcoming Earth-asteroid encounters:
Asteroid |
Date(UT)
|
Miss Distance
|
Velocity (km/s)
|
Diameter (m)
|
2018 DE1 |
2018-Aug-30
|
15.2 LD
|
6.5
|
28
|
2018 QW1 |
2018-Aug-30
|
9.1 LD
|
13.8
|
117
|
2018 RA |
2018-Sep-01
|
3 LD
|
6.9
|
16
|
2001 RQ17 |
2018-Sep-02
|
19.3 LD
|
8.3
|
107
|
2015 FP118 |
2018-Sep-03
|
12.3 LD
|
9.8
|
490
|
2018 QA |
2018-Sep-03
|
17.5 LD
|
20.4
|
73
|
2018 QU1 |
2018-Sep-11
|
10.9 LD
|
12.5
|
99
|
2017 SL16 |
2018-Sep-20
|
8.5 LD
|
6.4
|
25
|
2018 EB |
2018-Oct-07
|
15.5 LD
|
15.1
|
155
|
2014 US7 |
2018-Oct-17
|
3.2 LD
|
8.7
|
19
|
2013 UG1 |
2018-Oct-18
|
10.4 LD
|
13.4
|
123
|
2016 GC221 |
2018-Oct-18
|
8.7 LD
|
14.4
|
39
|
475534 |
2018-Oct-29
|
7.5 LD
|
18.1
|
204
|
Notes: LD means “Lunar Distance.” 1 LD = 384,401 km, the distance between Earth and the Moon. Table from SpaceWeather.com
Near-Earth objects (NEOs) discovered this month: 3, this year: 1115, all time: 18667.
Potentially hazardous asteroids: 1923 (as of September 5, 2018)
Minor Planets discovered: 779,736 (as of July 31, 2018)
Fireballs
On Sept. 5, 2018, the NASA All Sky Fireball Network reported 28 fireballs.

The Solar System
This is the position of the planets and a couple spacecraft in the solar system:



Spacecraft
The OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample return spacecraft is less than one million miles from its target.
NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft was launched 41 years ago today!
Exoplanets
Confirmed Exoplanets: 3,778 (8/23/2018)
Multi-Planet Systems: 625 (8/23/2018)
Kepler Candidate Exoplanets: 4,496 (8/31/2017)
TESS Candidate Exoplanets: 0
Data from the NASA Exoplanet Archive
Apps used for this post:
NASA Eyes on the Solar System: an immersive 3D solar system and space mission simulator – free for the PC /MAC.
I maintain the unofficial NASA Eyes Facebook page.
Stellarium: a free open source planetarium app for PC/MAC/Linux. It’s a great tool for planning observing sessions.
Aside: When I gather screen-shots from Stellarium, I typically pause time within the app. This morning, I was scrolling around and landed on the constellation Hercules. Looking at Hercules, I said “That’s not RIGHT!” There was an extra star there! I clicked on it, and it was NORAD satellite “USA 186.” I happened to pause the app when the satellite was in Hercules. The fact that I recognized that Hercules didn’t look right kinda shocked me!