The September sky is preparing to definitively greet the summer with the arrival of the autumn equinox, which will be on 23 September at 03.04 Italian time.
In fact, during the month the days will shorten by about 1 hour and 21 minutes.
In any case, the nights will continue to give a show: the protagonists will be the giant planets, Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune, as the Italian Amateur Astronomers Union (Uai) explains, which on the 16th, 17th and 18th of the month promotes the initiative "The nights of giants ".
Jupiter, in particular, will reach opposition to the Sun on September 26 and will therefore be in optimal observability conditions: it will rise in the South-East in the early hours of the night and set in the South-West before dawn.
Furthermore, the planet will also reach the maximum brightness for this year and the minimum distance from Earth,
Even Saturn, after being in opposition last August 14, can still be easily admired for a good part of the night, while Neptune will be in opposition to the Sun on September 16 but, being much less bright, it will not be visible to the naked eye.
However, the planet will be the protagonist of an interesting phenomenon: on the evening of September 14, starting at 11:08 pm Italian time, it will be hidden by the Moon for about an hour.
The September sky still allows you to observe most of those constellations that characterized the celestial vault in the central part of the summer.
Now, however, the stars that it was possible to admire very high in the sky around midnight are instead moved to the west, where they are about to set.
Around the middle of the month, the evening transits of the International Space Station (ISS), which still hosts Samantha Cristoforetti, will also resume.