Monthly Night Sky information provided by Chris Vaughan (@Astrogeoguy) at Starry Night Education (@StarryNightEdu).
Another 24 hours of eastward orbital motion will place the slightly fuller crescent moon less than a palm’s width to the upper right (or 5 degrees to the celestial north) of the brilliant planet Jupiter between the horns of Taurus, the Bull on Wednesday evening, April 2. The duo will share the view in binoculars […]
On Thursday evening, April 3, the terminator boundary that separtes the moon’s lit and dark hemispheres will fall just to the left of a trio of large craters named Theophilus, Cyrillus, and Catharina that curve along the western edge of gray Mare Nectaris. You can tell what order the craters were formed in by observing […]
On Friday night, April 4 in the western evening sky, the half-full moon will shine a fist’s diameter below (or 10 degrees to the celestial west of) the red planet Mars and Gemini’s two brightest stars, Pollux and Castor. Observers in more westerly time zones will see the moon closer to the line formed by […]
The lower part of the southwestern sky on early April evenings is dominated by the three bright stars of the Winter Triangle. The prominent asterism, which is visible even while the bright, waxing gibbous moon is shining nearby this weekend, is anchored on the bottom by the magnitude -1.45 star Sirius or Alpha Canis Majoris, […]
Three prominent craters break up the expanse of Oceanus Procellarum, the widespread dark region on the moon’s left-hand side. Large Copernicus is the easternmost of the craters. Its extensive, ragged ray system intermingles with that of the smaller crater Kepler to its southwest. The small, but very bright crater Aristarchus positioned northwest of them will […]