Of the 4 cross-quarter days - days that fall midway between equinoxes and solstices - Halloween is the spookiest. It comes as days grow short and nights long in the Northern Hemisphere.
The northern star Arcturus sets about 2 hours after sunset now, at the same point on the horizon as the summer sun. It provides an echo of long summertime afternoons.
When your camera stays fixed as the stars move throughout the night, you get a photo of what are called star trails. Then ... just add pumpkins. Gowrishankar Lakshminarayanan at Haines Falls, New York talks about his photo, here.
Elena Gissi in northern Italy sent this photo of Sunday's sunset. She's about 60 miles (100 km) from the site of still-raging wildfires. Click in for another photo, taken from not far away on the same evening.
This small asteroid (or comet) passed under Earth's orbit on October 14 at about 60 times the moon's distance. Now it appears to be heading toward interstellar space again.
Cosmologists are heading back to their chalkboards, as experiments designed to figure out what this unknown 84% of our universe actually is, come up empty.
Once the moon leaves the evening sky, starting at the end of the first week of November, try locating Neptune in front of the constellation Aquarius, and near the star Lambda Aquarii.