The Other March Madness

Slow-moving Saturn brightens up the faint constellation Cancer the Crab. Under light-polluted skies, Cancer is practically invisible. Even if you can’t easily see it, you can ‘locate’ Cancer by looking for the seemingly starless region between Gemini the Twins and Leo the Lion.

Meanwhile, speedy Mars continues its march through the constellation Taurus the Bull this month. Keep an eye on it as it travels against the background stars. By the middle of April, it will be well into Gemini the Twins. And in mid-June, Mars will spend a day or two among the stars of M-44, the Beehive cluster!

Stay up a little later for a view of giant Jupiter. Jupiter rises at the beginning of the month at 11:00 PM. By the end of the month it rises about 9:00 PM. It’s a great sight for small telescopes or good binoculars. With a telescope you may be able to see the planet’s cloud bands, which appear as faint stripes. With just binoculars, you may catch as many as four of Jupiter’s largest moons.

To see brilliant Venus this month, you’ll have to get up early. It rises a little before 4:00 am in March. Look for it low in the east before dawn - it’s unmistakably bright!

Don’t forget that you don’t have to spend all night outdoors to enjoy the night sky. It takes only a minute or two to wander outside, look up, and see what’s out there. Even if you find yourself glued to the TV during a certain basketball tournament this month... well, there’s always halftime!

The Moon Meets the Pleiades: No Foolin'

Once you’ve found Saturn, look just to the east of Saturn for the Beehive Cluster, an open star cluster also known as Praesepe or M-44. The Beehive is a great target for binoculars - you may catch a few dozen stars. Large telescopes reveal hundreds of stars in this pretty little cluster. The Beehive stars were all born a few hundred million years ago. That sounds positively ancient to you and me, but it’s fairly young as stars go.

This is also a good month to become acquainted with the Pleiades star cluster (M-45) located in Taurus. It’s one of the most famous and easily-spotted star clusters in the entire sky. Under clear dark skies, most people see about six or maybe seven stars in a pattern that looks like a very small version of the Big Dipper. Like the Beehive, you’ll find dozens of stars with binoculars, and hundreds with a good telescope.

If you have a telescope, be careful to use low magnification when observing star clusters such as the Beehive or Pleiades. These clusters are already pretty big in our sky. If you magnify them too much, you’ll only see a small portion of them in your eyepiece.

On the evening of April 1, observers will be treated to a rare event: a thin crescent Moon passes directly in front of, or occults, the Pleiades. In our part of the world, the event begins before sunset, so we won’t be able to see the entire occultation. As the sky begins to darken (around 7:00 PM,) grab your binoculars and look low to the west for the Moon.

With a little patience, you can watch the Moon slide across the Pleiades over the course of an hour. You may just see stars winking out behind the unlit side of the Moon, and reappearing from behind the lit edge.

April 1 also happens to be the date of the first star party of the spring! Members of the Barnard-Seyfert Astronomical Society will be set up with telescopes and other astronomical equipment at the Special Events Field at Edwin Warner Park from 8:00 PM to 10:00 PM.

Officially, by the time the star party begins, the occultation of the Pleiades will be almost over. Fortunately, it’s perfectly OK to arrive at the park early. If weather conditions are good, there will no doubt be people already there set up to watch the big show!

Whenever you arrive, remember that even during the springtime, it can get chilly in the evening. Dress in layers to make the most of your observing time!

There are many more star parties scheduled for throughout the year. For a complete list, visit our star parties schedule

The View from Hubble

Next month marks the 16th anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope’s launch into orbit. As major observatories go, it’s not incredibly big, but it does have the advantage of being above the atmosphere of the Earth. Our atmosphere not only blocks out certain wavelengths of ultraviolet light, but it scatters the light that does reach the surface, making images blurry - even on the clearest nights. Hubble is perfect for observing faint, extremely distant objects - the kind of targets that can help astronomers piece together the early history of our universe. Of course, it can also keep track of much closer, more familiar objects like the planets in our own Solar System.

To learn more about this incredible observatory, visit the planetarium for Hubble: Images of the Infinite, playing daily throughout the summer.