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Look up for treats in the Halloween night sky

This year's Haloween moon sets at 2:17 p.m. and doesn't rise again until after midnight, so make sure your little princesses and superheroes have a flashlight.

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Look up for treats in the Halloween night sky
By
Tony Rice
, WRAL contributor/NASA Ambassador
RALEIGH, N.C. — Halloween 2017 was lit by a nearly full moon, making it easier for trick-or-treaters to find their way around their neighborhoods.
This year's Haloween moon sets at 2:17 p.m. and doesn’t rise again until after midnight, so make sure your little princesses and superheroes have a flashlight.

Take a moment to look up while you are out this evening, as Mars will be the most prominent planet in the sky. Look for the orangey point of light in the southwestern sky about a third of a way up. You might also make out Saturn to the right and low on the horizon, but only if your horizon is very clear.

To the right of Mars, still in the southwest, look for the stars Deneb, Altair and Vega, known as the summer triangle. Vega is the brightest.

Look to the south for the Pleiades, a cluster of seven bright stars which are the subject of myths and stories across the druids, Incas, many native American peoples and nearly every ancient culture. The Pleiades are at their highest right at midnight on (or near enough for the Druids) Halloween.

The International Space Station (ISS) was visible earlier this morning, but this evening, look for the Chinese space station Tiangong 2 rising from the west at 7:42 p.m. and disappearing into Earth’s shadow 3.5 minutes later in the north. A large piece of space junk, part of a rocket that launched a Chinese weather satellite in 1988, will also be visible, rising in the south at 7:26 pm and setting 8 minutes later in the north.

Neither will be as bright as the ISS but both should be visible under reasonably dark suburban.

Tony Rice is a volunteer in the NASA/JPL Solar System Ambassador program and software engineer at Cisco Systems. You can follow him on Twitter @rtphokie.

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