The last weekend of summer is upon us. While autumn can be wonderful in so many ways with changing leaf colors and much less humidity in the air, it’s always hard for a lot of folks, including me, to say good bye to summer. But as the lyrics of the old Steve Miller tune “Fly Like an Eagle” go, “Time keeps on slippin’ slippin’ slippin’ into the future.”

This coming early Monday morning at 2:50 a.m. is the autumnal equinox, the astronomical beginning of autumn. The sun’s path across the daytime Marshall sky is right along the celestial equator, an imaginary line in the dome of the sky that is a projection of the Earth’s equator. Since late last March the sun has been north of the celestial equator giving us long days and a high sun angle. After this Monday the sun’s path in the sky will sink lower and lower, south of the celestial equator, and the days will get shorter. This will continue until the winter solstice in late December.

It’s true that on both the autumnal equinox tomorrow and the vernal equinox in late March that the sun rises directly in the east and sets directly in the west. If you happen to drive straight eastward on the highway in the early morning or straight westward in the early evening have those sunglasses handy. You’ll need them!

There are some myths about the autumnal equinox. It’s said that on the first official day of fall on Monday that days and nights are equal in length. That’s just not true. Until this Friday days will still be longer than nights. That’s because Earth’s atmosphere plays a trick on us. It bends sunlight. It’s called astronomical refraction and the effect is much more pronounced when the sun is close to the horizon. That’s because the light has to plow through a thicker layer of our atmosphere. The bending of the sun’s light is so extreme along the horizon that the sun can actually be below the horizon, but appear to be above the horizon. As crazy as that sounds it’s true. That’s how we can hang on to longer days than nights for a few days after tomorrow’s equinox.

A total fable that you may have heard is that it’s easier to balance an egg on its end on the day of the autumnal equinox. It’s just not true. No matter what day of the year it is it’s nearly impossible to balance an egg on end unless you’ve been cheating and slightly sanding off one of the ends!

This time of year in the darker countryside skies, where you can really, really get the full stargazing experience, you can’t help but notice the bright band of milky light that nearly bisects the sky from north-northeast to south-southwest. You’re seeing what’s known as the Milky Way band which is the thickest part our home Milky Way Galaxy. Every single star we see in the night sky is a member of our galaxy, but most of them are only in a tiny neighborhood of the Milky Way.

If you could jump into a magical spaceship and fling yourself out and away from the Milky Way, what you would see in your rearview mirror is a group of 200 to 300 billion stars in the shape of a flying saucer, broken up into spiral arms with a large hump in the middle. The Milky Way is a little more than 100,000 light-years in diameter and 10,000 light-years thick, although the center bulge is about 30,000 light-years thick. By the way, one light-year alone is equal to about 6 trillion miles! Our sun is about 30,000 light-years from the center of the galaxy in one of the arms.

When you see that milky band of light across the sky, you are looking edgewise into our galaxy. All of the stars we see obediently orbit around the center of the Milky Way. It’s estimated that our sun takes over 200 million years to make one circuit. In case you’re wondering, the center of the Milky Way lays in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius the Archer, more commonly known by its nickname “the Teapot” because that’s what it really looks like. Sagittarius lies in the very low southwestern sky in the early evening. That part of the Milky Way band would be much brighter around the teapot, but there are tremendous amounts of interstellar gas and dust that block the “hump” at our galaxy’s center. It’s been said that if we could see the Milky Way’s central region unobstructed, that area of the sky would be much brighter than a full moon!

Lie back on a blanket on the ground or a reclining lawn chair and just roll your eyes all across the sky and especially around the Milky Way band. With just a pair of binoculars you’ll see all kinds of celestial treasures like bright nebulae clouds, star clusters, and dark rifts. You might even see a few human made satellites rolling across the heavens.

Kick back and enjoy the greatest show off the Earth. One more thing to contemplate as you’re galaxy gazing is that the Milky Way Galaxy is only one of at least 100 billion galaxies out there in the known universe! It’s a big sky and big universe for you to enjoy!

Mike Lynch is an amateur astronomer and professional broadcast meteorologist for WCCO Radio in Minneapolis/St. Paul.