76° / 50°Fog, then showers lateSunset 6:04 PM
A warm, breezy day before the cooldown; tonight the crescent Moon sits beside a red star.
Look up
Just after sunset, look low in the southwest for the crescent Moon with an orange-red star beside it. That star is Antares, so big that set in the Sun's place it would reach into the asteroid belt.
Go see
BU's Coit Observatory opens its roof to the public tonight at 7:30. Saturn is up all evening this month, and through a telescope its rings are nearly edge-on, a thin bright line across the planet.
Right outside
The daddy longlegs on the shed wall is a harvestman, not a spider: one body piece, no silk, no fangs, no venom. A leg it drops keeps twitching as a decoy for a predator, and it never grows back.
Touch it
Bucks strip the dead velvet off their antlers on saplings, then keep rubbing to mark their ground before the November rut. Look for young trunks shredded pale, knee to waist high, in the Fells, the Blue Hills or any wooded park.
Look up
Sunday at 5:54am the space station, a steady light that never blinks, climbs out of the west to high in the north-northwest and fades low in the northeast by 6:00. Saturday night's forecast is mostly clear.
Right outside
A slate-gray sparrow with a clean white belly, hopping on the ground under a feeder, is a junco, here from October to April and gone all summer. When it flies, its white outer tail feathers flash open.
Go see
Mycologist Lawrence Millman leads a fungi walk around Fresh Pond Reservation on Sunday afternoon, a place with 399 recorded mushroom species. It caps at 15 people, so register now.
Go see
On Sunday morning, migrating songbirds caught at Belle Isle Marsh are banded in a biologist's hand, so you see a bird you would normally glimpse in a treetop from a foot away. It is free; rain or high wind cancels.
Coming soon
The Orionids are grit from Halley's Comet burning up about sixty miles overhead. A bright Moon fills most of the peak night, so the dark stretch is from about 3am to first light on the 22nd.
Coming soon
Mass Audubon's Habitat takes families with kids 5 to 12 into the woods after dark under an almost full moon, to listen for night animals. It is a small paid program, so book now.
Coming soon
BU ecologist Richard Primack leads a free walk past Webster Woods' cliffs, the Alcove, 'Mountain Lion' Rock and an enormous recent rockfall near Hammond Pond. Booking is required.
That's what's worth noticing.Go have a look.