Bob Moler's Ephemeris Blog

This is Ephemeris for Tuesday, September 9th. Today the Sun will be up for 12 hours and 49 minutes, setting at 8:04, and it will rise tomorrow at 7:16. The Moon, 2 days past full, will rise at 8:51 this evening.

Interstellar object 3I/ATLAS is closing in on the planet Mars, which it will reach nearest to on October 1st. Some speculate, including one Harvard professor, that maybe it’s an alien probe. This object is much too slow to traverse the interstellar medium between stars with a biological crew, who are short-lived like us. More likely it would be crewed by robots run by artificial intelligence, like which we are beginning to perfect. 3I/ATLAS will not get very close to the Earth, but will get close to Mars. That got me to speculating, tongue in cheek of course, that being a machine intelligence they would be more interested in Mars. The reason being, that Mars is the only planet that’s entirely inhabited by robots, like themselves.

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