Night Sky
—What is over the creek tonight, and what is worth staying up for. Nothing on this page needs a telescope. Jefferson County carries enough light that the faint things are gone, but the moon, the bright planets, and the good meteor showers all still work from a dark yard.
🌙Moon · Tonight
⏳Moon age
🌑Dark hours · Tonight
☄️Next meteor shower
The moon
One cycle, twenty nine and a half days—
This month
——
The meteor year
Seven worth a lookA shower is the Earth running through the dust trail an old comet left behind. The date repeats every year because the trail sits in the same place in the orbit. What changes is the moon: a bright one washes out everything but the brightest streaks, which is why a good shower and a good night are two different questions.
Watching from here
What a Jefferson County yard can do
Give it twenty minutes and stay off your phone
Eyes take about twenty minutes to adapt to the dark and one look at a bright screen resets the clock. Face away from the nearest streetlight, let the horizon be something other than a floodlit parking lot, and the difference between a bad sky and a decent one is mostly patience. The creek bottoms below the ridge lines are darker than the roads above them.
Where this comes from Moon phase, moon age, and sunrise and sunset are calculated on the page from the date and this location, using the standard solar position approximation and the length of the lunar cycle. Nothing on this page is fetched from a sky service. The month by month notes are written by the sky desk and kept in this site's own file. Meteor shower peak dates are the long-run averages for each shower and move a day either way from year to year.