Also called the Moon Cake Festival, China’s harvest festival is an occasion to scoff these sweet treats. The cakes, made of a thin dough shell containing fillings such as jelly, dates and nuts or red bean paste, start appearing everywhere a month before the celebration. If they’re not sick of the snacks by the time of the event, celebrants eat them within view of the real star of the festival: the moon. Held on the September full moon, during the autumn equinox, the tradition is about observing the transition of the seasons. In Japan, one of the other Asian countries where faces turn to the night sky, people even climb onto rooftops to get closer to the moon.
The planet Mercury will pass close to the bright star Spica in Virgo. This is a particularly good apparition of Mercury for observers in the Southern Hemisphere, less so for northerners.