Night Sky
—🌙Moon · Tonight
⏳Moon age
🌑Dark hours · Tonight
☄️Next meteor shower
Nothing here needs a telescope. Jefferson County throws enough light that the faint things are gone, but plenty still works from a dark yard.
- 🌙The moon. What phase it is in, and how much of the night it leaves properly dark.
- 🪐The planets. Which are up tonight, when they rise, and which way to look.
- ☄️Meteor showers. When the next one peaks, and whether the moon will spoil it.
The Perseids in August and the Geminids in December are the two most people around Graysville, Cardiff, and Brookside can name, and the Geminids are usually the better of the pair on a night the moon stays out of the way.
The moon
One cycle, twenty nine and a half days—
This month
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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.
The sky over the creek
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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.