SPRING IS FOR STARGAZING

Well, March may have gone out like a lamb but Venus went out in glory! Near the end of last month, Venus became a very large, thin, crescent shape because of the sun, Venus, Earth geometrical configuration. The crescent shape was easily visible in ordinary binoculars. Venus has now streaked across the sun and can be found on the west side, which makes it visible in early morning so you can catch its flipside spectacle if you missed it last month.

The stars and constellations will appear to change rapidly this time of year. As it gets darker later the stars are farther along their daily path before they are seen, giving the appearance that they dive into the western sunset and jet up out of the east. The planets Jupiter and Saturn get lower in the west at sunset each day, as their time with us is limited. They do manage a pretty sight when they bracket the young moon on the 25th.

The mighty constellation Orion is setting in the west at sunset, bidding us farewell after looking over us for the last few months. In place of Orion we have a rather lackluster part of the sky, from our unaided eye point of view, leaving Leo the lion to be the king of drabness. We are now looking straight out and away from the disk of our galaxy, the Milky Way, and so see fewer and dimmer stars.

For astronomers who study the other galaxies in space, this is prime time, however. With the bulk of our own galaxy out of the way, the coast is clear for looking out into the vastness of the rest of the universe.

The closest, large cluster of galaxies is located in the constellation Virgo and is thus referred to as the Virgo cluster, even though the galaxies are millions of light years distant and appear to be in the Virgo constellation only by chance.

The Milky Way begins to make an appearance only after midnight while the Big Dipper rides high and upside down in the north. See if you can make out the second star in the handle as a double star. Normally, easily visible under good conditions, I can make them out only about half the time from our Mississippi valley.

I am frequently asked how far the human eye can see. Some will guess a few miles, others perhaps 100 miles. The truth is that distance isn't the limiting factor; brightness is. The apparent brightness of an object diminishes as its distance squared. This means that if the distance is doubled, the brightness decreases by a factor of four. If our sun were half its distance away, it would appear four times brighter.

The truth is that on a clear, dry night the unaided eye can just make out the Andromeda galaxy, which remains a morning object this month.

This galaxy is more than 2 million light years away, which means light takes two million years to reach us from that distance. How spectacular the sight would be if it were a hundred times closer!

I will close the month with some philosophy. Don't forget that fools will switch over to daylight savings time today. Be assured that the inverse logic that all who switch to daylight savings time today are fools is not correct. One of these statements is true.

We will figure this out next month.