Skywatch Line for Friday, March 8, through Sunday, March 10, 2024 written by Sam Salem
This is Dudley Observatory’s Skywatch Line for Friday, March 8, through Sunday, March 10, written by Sam Salem.
On Friday, Sun rises at 6:18am and sets at 5:54pm; Moon rises at 5:41am and sets at 3:48pm. Daylight saving time begins at 2am Sunday morning. Clocks spring ahead an hour.
New Moon occurs on Sunday. The new Moon rises and sets with the Sun. This is the third new supermoon this year. The Moon will reach perigee, its closest point in its elliptical orbit around Earth on Sunday, when it’s 221,763 miles away.
The zodiacal light, a hazy pyramid of light, really sunlight reflecting off dusk grains that move in the plane of our solar system, is now visible after evening twilight for Northern Hemisphere observers with dark skies.
Jupiter, at magnitude –2.2 in the constellation of Aries, is the bright white dot high in the west in twilight, lower as evening advances. It sets around 10pm. In a telescope, Jupiter has shrunk to only 35 arcseconds wide. It’s nearly as distant and small as it gets.
Jupiter is almost equidistant between star Hamal (Alpha Arietis) a fist-width to its right, and star Menkar (Alpha Ceti) a fist-width to its left. The two stars are magnitudes 2.0 and 2.5, respectively.
Uranus, at magnitude 5.7 in the constellation of Aries, is 8 degrees above Jupiter. Use the finder charts to help you locate the planet in the night sky.
On Saturday, Algol shines at its minimum brightness, magnitude 3.4 instead of its usual 2.1, for a couple hours centered on 10:07pm EST. Algol takes several additional hours to fade and to re-brighten.
Bright Sirius now stands due south on the meridian just as twilight fades out into night. Sirius is the bottom star of the equilateral Winter Triangle. The other two stars of the Triangle are orange Betelgeuse to Sirius’s upper right (Orion’s shoulder) and Procyon to Sirius’s upper left. This is the time of year when the Winter Triangle balances on Sirius shortly after dark.
On the traditional divide between the winter and spring sky is the dim constellation of Cancer. It lies between the constellation of Gemini to its west and the constellation of Leo to its east. Cancer holds the Beehive Star Cluster, M44 in its middle. The Beehive shows dimly to the naked eye if you have little or no light pollution. It’s a bit less than halfway from Pollux in Gemini to Regulus in Leo. With binoculars it’s easy even under worse conditions. Look for a scattered clump of faint little stars.