Skywatch April & May 2010
Any time is a wonderful time to be in the Virgin Islands. This time of this year is a great time to spend some time at night sky watching. Once another beautiful Virgin Island day has ended, the Sun has set, and the sky has grown dark, look overhead and you will see a bright, red, star-like object. This is not a star at all but the planet Mars.
If you look slightly northwest of Mars you will find two bright stars of about the same brightness. These are Pollux and Castor and mark the head of the Gemini Twins. If you know the name Gemini, it is probably because it is one of the twelve constellations that form a band which encircles the sky, the zodiac. It is to the zodiac that we must look to see the planets. Moving eastward along the zodiac, we next come to Aries, the Ram. There are no bright stars to be seen here and thus Aries is usually difficult to find, but since Mars is currently seen against the background of stars of Aries, once you locate Mars you have found Aries. If you look still farther East, you will come to a bright star, Regulus, the red heart of Leo, the Lion.
Regulus is also the point at the base of a backwards question mark. The top of the question mark is Leo's head and a triangle of fainter stars toward the East marks the Lion's hind quarters and tail. Don't worry if you cannot see a Lion here, most people can't either, but you should be able to find the backwards question mark.
If you continue eastward you will come to another bright star-like object, the planet Saturn. On March 22nd, Saturn will be at its closest approach to Earth for all of 2010. Of course, when you are talking distances in the Solar System, "close" is relative. Saturn will be only 790,480,000 miles (1,272,000,000 kilometers) away.
North of Leo, look for seven fairly bright stars which form a dipper or a cooking pot -- three stars mark the handle and four more the bowl. This is the Big Dipper. Some people know that if you draw a line through the two stars at the end of the bowl and extend the line away from the bowl, you come to the North Star. Now, remember, the North Star is NOT the brightest star in the sky. In fact, it really isn't bright at all. It happens to be at a point in the heavens almost directly over the North Pole of the Earth. So having found the North Star, if you did not know which way was North you would now know.
The night of April 21-22 will be the maximum of the Lyrid meteor shower. If you are away from bright lights and smog, between midnight and dawn you might see a dozen or so "shooting stars" per hour. Shooting stars, more properly called meteors, are the flash of light we see as pebble-sized rocks burn up speeding through the air some 50 miles about the Earth.
