October skies among most clear, but what to see?

Autumn is here and we can now expect the warm, clear night of summer to be relegated to only fading memories and the cloudy, cool nights of autumn will set in.

Well now, hold on there Sparky, information obtained from the National Climatic Center reports October, for at least one quarter of the nation, is the least cloudy month of the year.

In an arc running from Maine to Florida, to Texas, up to the western half of Nebraska, through Illinois, southern Indiana and Ohio and back up to Maine, the center reports a 50 percent chance of clear skies for evening viewing in October.

It is too bad that the October skies are probably some of the least interesting to look at of the entire year. Oh, sure, there is Pegasus and Perseus and his whole crew, and for a while the bright stars of the Summer Triangle still hold sway, but generally, in the early evening, there are no bright stars to attract our attention in the west and south.

Looking south there is only one first magnitude star. It is positioned close to the horizon at 9 p.m. MDT and higher in the south at 10 p.m. MDT, and that is our old friend Fomalhaut (pronounced FOAM-a-low), the brightest star in the constellation of Piscis Austrinus, the Southern Fish.

Fomalhaut has been called the loneliest star for its seeming solitude in the south. Even the stars making up its constellation are not generally visible. In antiquity it was held in some importance as it was one of the Persian "Royal Stars."

It lies in what is today called the "watery" part of the sky. All of the nearby constellations are associated with water, the zodiacal constellations of Capricornus, the Sea Goat, Aquarius, the Water Bearer, Pisces, the Fish, also Cetus, the Whale (or as some call it the Sea Monster), and Eridanus, the celestial river.

The reason for a lack of interesting objects or other bright stars is when looking at Fomalhaut, we are looking down out of the flat spiral of our galaxy and there is just not much to see in that direction.

One reason for Fomalhaut's brightness is its closeness to Earth, it is only 23 light years away. One of the brightest stars in the sky, Vega, is 25 light years away. Other close, bright stars are Sirius, Procyon and Altair.

SKY WATCH: New Moon, Oct. 18,

Tonight, Saturn, which is just coming from being around on the far side of the Sun, and bright Venus will make a fine early morning pairing, a dimmer Mercury will join the two about six degrees to the lower right, although it might be washed out by a soon-rising Sun.

Reddish Mars will be up higher in Gemini and a very slender crescent moon will be just below Regulus in Leo, the Lion. On Oct. 16 an even more slender, almost invisible crescent moon will be just below and right of Venus. All of the International Space Station passes this week will be very short and very early in the morning, hardly worth getting up for.

NEXT TIME: More astronomical blathering.