Slender Moon for Saturday evening

Spring evenings are favorable for catching the Young Moon.  It climbs rapidly from day to day because of the steep angle of the ecliptic to the horizon.

See the end note about enlarging illustrations.

As usual, we show a lot more detail than you could hope to see at this early stage of twilight, in which the sky is really brighter.  Even Sirius and Betelgeuse may not pop out till your eye wanders near them.  But it’s worth knowing where the Milky Way and Uranus and the constellation Aries would be if you could see them, so as to sense where you are looking in the solar system and the universe.

The numbers beside the Moon’s dates, such as “+80,” are its “age” in hours since the moment when it was New (passing the Sun).  Thus you can see that at this date, and for the mid-USA longitude of 90° west, the Moon is only 40 hours old – a day and two-thirds.  At this clock time in the next time zone to the east, the Moon will be an hour younger and slimmer, and for Europe it will be even lower and more inaccessible.  But at the same clock time two zones west, on the Pacific coast, the Moon will be two hours older and marginally easier to see.

It has been glimpsed with the naked eye when it was less than a day old. That’s a feat that needs planning, skill, and perfect conditions.  The crescent is still awesomely slender and difficult to spot even when it is 2 or even 3 days old.

Mars, gradually dimming as it circles toward the far side of its orbit, is moving on between the Pleiades (which it passed on March 31) and the Hyades.

This is one of the busy areas of the celestial sphere, which give me a bit of interesting trouble during the hours of adjusting the positions of labels on a chart.  “Aldebaran” is a nuisance! because so near to a corner of Orion on one side, and you can’t move it to the other side because of the crowd of stars called the Hyades.  Making the Map of the Starry Sky, I had to adjust the labels of 1,300 stars and 120 deep-sky objects, and became very aware of the busy-ness of regions such as the Virgo and Coma “Realm of Galaxies,” Orion’s Belt,  the Southern Cross and the Coal Sack, the galactic-forward direction  in Cygnus (with Deneb and the Cocoon and North America and Pelican nebulae) and the galactic-outward direction near where Taurus and Gemini and Auriga meet, and of course the galactic center where Sagittarius meets Scorpius and Ophiuchus.  And it isn’t easy to place a labels such as “the False Cross” and “the Three Leaps of the Gazelle” so that you know which stars are meant!

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DIAGRAMS in these posts are made with precision but have to be inserted in another format.  You may be able to enlarge them on your monitor.  One way: right-click, and choose “View image”, then enlarge.  Or choose “Copy image”, then put it on your desktop, then open it.  On an iPad or phone, use the finger gesture that enlarges (spreading with two fingers, or tapping and dragging with three fingers).  I am grateful to know of what methods work for you.