Photo of the Week. A classic pairing of the Moon
with Venus -- fifty years ago. (Photo added to
Moonlight.)
Astronomy news for the two weeks starting Friday, March 14,
2008.
Skylights will next appear March 28, 2008.
The Moon passes
its first quarter right at the beginning
of our fortnight, on Friday, March 14. It then waxes in the gibbous phase for the next week until it passes
full on Friday the 21st, following which
it wanes in the gibbous toward third quarter, which is not reached until
Saturday the 29th, three days after it passes apogee, where it
is farthest from the
Earth.
Watch the evening of Friday the 14th, when the near-quarter passes
just to the north of Mars, allowing
easy location of the bright planet. Then, the evening of Tuesday
the 18th, the Moon will make a fine lineup with Regulus and Saturn, the
three all in a row, with the Moon to the west of the star, Saturn
to the east. Keep watching, and around midnight you can see the
Moon passing just to the south of Regulus. By the following
evening, the Moon will have switched to the other side of the
planet. As it continues, the Moon will then pass just south of Antares in Scorpius the morning of Thursday the 27th.
The morning hours also feature another conjunction between Venus
and Mercury on Sunday
the 23rd, but the pair is so low that it will be impossible to see.
These hours are really Jupiter's
domain, the planet rising brightly in the southeast in northeastern
Sagittarius around 3:30 AM Daylight
Time, just half an hour or so after Mars (which transits high to
the south just after sundown) sets. Saturn, well up in the east in
the evening, now transits around 11:30 Daylight, while setting in
mid-dawn.
The Big Event, however, belongs to Earth. At 12:48 AM Central
Daylight Time (1:48 AM EDT) the morning of Thursday the 20th, the
northward-moving Sun crosses the celestial
equator at the Vernal Equinox
in Pisces, bringing
astronomical spring to the northern hemisphere, fall to the
southern. In the west, the crossing occurs before midnight (11:48
PM MDT, 10:48 PDT), bringing in spring at an especially early March
19. On the day of the crossing, the Sun rises due east, sets due
west, is up for 12 hours and down for 12, rises at the north pole
and sets at the south (though the continuous solar movement, solar
diameter, and atmospheric refraction skew things a bit).
