The Evening Sky in September 2026
Three naked-eye planets are in the evening sky during September, but not all together.
Brilliant Venus appears in the west soon after sunset (or before if you know where to look.) It sets four hours after the Sun at the beginning of the month and three hours after the Sun at the end. It will be close to Spica, the brightest star in Virgo, in the first days of September. In a telescope it appears as a tall thin crescent. The Moon will be near Venus on the 14th.
Mercury begins its best evening sky appearance of the year in the second week of the month. It looks like a medium-bright star, due west, straight below Venus. On the 12th it is setting an hour after the Sun along with the thin crescent Moon . It moves higher, night-to-night, setting two hours after the Sun at month’s end. Mercury will be near Spica around the 26th and will be the brighter of the two.
Saturn is due east, looking like a medium-bright cream-coloured star. It rises around 8:40 at the beginning of the month and is up at twilight at the end. Saturn will be to the right of the full Moon on the 27th.
Bright stars shine around the skyline. Orange Arcturus is in the northwest, often twinkling red and green as it sets. Canopus, the brightest true star in the evening sky, skims along the southern skyline, twinkling all colours. Vega is low in the north. It is the second-brightest northern star after Arcturus. From northern Aotearoa the star Deneb can be seen near the north skyline. It is the brightest star in the cross-shaped constellation of Cygnus the Swan.
Orange Antares, northwest of the zenith, marks the body of the Scorpion. The Scorpion's tail hooks toward the zenith like a back-to-front question mark. It is the 'fishhook of Maui' in some Māori star lore. Below or right of the Scorpion's tail is 'the teapot' made by the brightest stars of Sagittarius. It is upside down in our southern hemisphere view.
Midway down the southwest sky are 'The Pointers ', Beta and Alpha Centauri. They point down to Crux the Southern Cross. Alpha Centauri is the third brightest star. It is also the closest of the naked-eye stars, 4.3 light-years* away. Beta Centauri, along with most of the stars in Crux, is a super-bright blue-giant star hundreds of light-years away.
The Milky Way spans the sky from north to south. It is brightest and broadest overhead in Scorpius and Sagittarius. In a dark sky it can be traced down past the Pointers and Crux into the southwest. To the northeast it passes Altair, meeting the skyline right of Vega. The Milky Way is our edgewise view of the galaxy, the pancake of billions of stars of which the sun is just one. The thick hub of the galaxy, 27 000 light years away, is in Sagittarius. Dust clouds near us appear as gaps and slots in the Milky Way. Binoculars show many clusters of stars and some glowing gas clouds in the Milky Way.
The Large and Small Clouds of Magellan, LMC and SMC, look like two misty patches of light in the south sky. They are easily seen by eye on a dark moonless night. They are galaxies like our Milky Way but much smaller. The LMC is about 160 000 light years away; the SMC about 200 000 light years away.
On moonless evenings, in a dark sky, the Zodiacal Light is visible in the west. It appears as a faint broad column of light extending up past Mercury and Venus, toward Antares. It is sunlight reflecting off meteoric dust in the plane of the solar system.
Golden Jupiter appears low in the sky toward the northeast around dawn. It rises an hour before the Sun at the beginning of the month and two hours before at the end. Mars rises 2½ hours before the Sun through the month, a medium-bright red ‘star’, low in the northeast,
*A light-year (l.y.) is the distance that light travels in one year: nearly 10 million million km or 10^13 km. Sunlight takes eight minutes to get here; moonlight about one second. Sunlight reaches Neptune, the outermost major planet, in four hours. It takes sunlight four years to reach the nearest star, Alpha Centauri.
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