This is Ephemeris for Wednesday, September 3rd. Today the Sun will be up for 13 hours and 7 minutes, setting at 8:15, and it will rise tomorrow at 7:09. The Moon, 3 days past first quarter, will set at 3:04 tomorrow morning.
Let’s take our weekly look at the whereabouts of the naked-eye planets. The Red Planet Mars is too close to the direction of the Sun to spot. This is the curse of trying to view evening planets, which are near the direction of the Sun in late summer and early fall, for us at higher latitudes. Saturn now rises at 8:58 PM in the east. In a telescope Saturn sports a very thin ring, 2 ½° from being edge on. This angle will decrease to about a third of a degree by November 23rd before increasing. By 6 AM Saturn will be in the southwest. Jupiter will appear above the brighter Venus in the eastern sky and among the stars of Gemini. Venus and Jupiter are joining the bright winter stars, a beautiful sight in the morning twilight.
The astronomical event times given in this blog are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan (Lat 44.7° N, Long 85.7° W; EDT, UT – 4 hours) unless stated otherwise. Times will be different for other locations.
Addendum
Saturn and the Moon at 10 PM tonight, September 3, 2025. Created using Stellarium.
The Moon tonight, September 3, 2025. A view visible in small telescopes showing an image with and without selected features labeled. Created using Stellarium, LibreOffice Draw, and GIMP.
Venus and Jupiter are visible in the east among the winter stars at 6:00 AM tomorrow morning, September 4, 2025. Saturn is off in the west-southwest. Created using Stellarium and GIMP.
Telescopic Saturn, Jupiter and Venus (north up) as they would be seen in a small telescope with the same magnification. On the evening of the September 3rd 2025, Saturn will be 19.4″ in diameter, but its rings, even being nearly edge on, should show up brighter than seen here, and extend to 45.1″. They are tilted 2.5° from being edge on. On the morning of the September 4th 2025, Jupiter will be 35.0″ in diameter. Venus’ apparent diameter will be 12.1″, and be 85.2% illuminated. The (”) symbol means seconds of arc, or 1/3600th of a degree. Created using Cartes du Ciel (Sky Charts), LibreOffice Draw and GIMP.
The naked-eye planets and the Moon at sunset and sunrise on a single night, starting with sunset on the right on September 3rd, 2025. The night ends on the left with sunrise on the 4th. Click or tap on the image to enlarge it. Created using my LookingUp app and GIMP.
This is a low precision ephemeris of the Sun Moon and naked eye planet positions for today and tomorrow, September 3rd and 4th, 2025. Some of the columns are self-explanatory, others are not. The transit column is the time that the body crosses the meridian and is due south. Elong, for elongation, is the angle between the Sun and that body. RA is right ascension, which is the object’s east-west position on the celestial sphere in hours and minutes. Dec is declination which is the north-south position of the object on the celestial sphere in degrees and minutes. R is the distance of that object from the Sun in astronomical units. An astronomical unit is about 93 million miles or 150 million kilometers. And Delta is the distance of that object from the Earth, also in astronomical units. I omit the ‘m’ in am and pm for compactness. The data was generated using my LookingUp for DOS app and displayed as a table by my Ephemeris Helper app.
Thank you, glad you like the program. I figured out after a few years that holding pictures up to the mic wasn’t working, so I started a blog to illustrate and extend my remarks.
Bob Moler's Ephemeris Blog 
i have loved listening to you for years and now I discovered you on line!! Thank you!!
Thank you, glad you like the program. I figured out after a few years that holding pictures up to the mic wasn’t working, so I started a blog to illustrate and extend my remarks.