The autumnal equinox–I’m letting my boreal chauvinism show–is just an hour or so away (2:05 a.m. PDT, 0905 Coordinated Universal Time. Special treat if you’re up in these wee hours: a crescent moon rising (nearly) alongside Mars).
In other equinox news, an explanation of the equinox by way of a 2007 NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day.
And not strictly equinox-related, but too beautiful to pass by: NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day for today, which features the aurora borealis as viewed in northwestern Canada. If you like that image, there a lot more here.
Update: Well, the sun is up and it’s sure enough fall. I was looking for an apt seasonal quote, and this morning Kate pointed one out; something from John Muir, cited as an introductory quote in a book of Diane Ackerman essays, “Dawn Light”:
“This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never all dried at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls.”
(The quote apparently comes from Muir’s journals, published as “John of the Mountains” in 1938.)