{"id":2794,"date":"2023-03-23T00:46:27","date_gmt":"2023-03-23T00:46:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/?p=2794"},"modified":"2023-03-23T00:49:34","modified_gmt":"2023-03-23T00:49:34","slug":"astrocal-april-2023","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/?p=2794","title":{"rendered":"AstroCal – April 2023"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Let us start the month with the elephant in the room, or should we say in the western sky?<\/span><\/p>\n

Venus <\/b>remains the star of the show, so to speak, dominating the western sky.\u00a0 After Venus and <\/span>Jupiter<\/b> had their very close encounter early in March, they began to drift apart\u00a0 until Jupiter dropped out of the picture by the end of the month.\u00a0 Jupiter will be in conjunction with the <\/span>Sun<\/b> on April 11 so it will not be seen at all in April.\u00a0 With a magnitude of -3.98, one can almost find Venus with their eyes shut.\u00a0 Simply find the brightest object in the western sky one hour after sunset.\u00a0 On April 9-12, it will pass just to the left of the<\/span> Pleiades star cluster<\/b> in <\/span>Taurus, the Bull<\/b>.\u00a0 Venus will also pass 7.4 degrees north of the star <\/span>Aldebaran <\/b>on April 18.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>Mercury<\/b> is in its best viewing position in the evening sky and starts the month just to the lower right of Venus.\u00a0 At its greatest elongation from the Sun (19.5 degrees on April 11), it will start with magnitude -0.5 but quickly fade to +0.1 by that date.\u00a0 A good viewing challenge for April would be to see what is the last date you can see the fast moving Mercury before it drops below the western skyline near mid-month.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>Uranus<\/b> will be located between Venus and Mercury but its low magnitude (+5.8) will make it difficult to spot that close to the horizon.\u00a0 <\/span>Mars<\/b> remains high in the sky as it moves eastward through the stars of <\/span>Gemini, the Twins<\/b>. The <\/span>Red Planet\u2019s<\/b> brightness will fade as it moves from a distance of 136.1 million miles from the Earth early in the month to 161.6 million miles away by the end of April.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>Saturn<\/b> will be the morning planet of most interest as it will rise in the east 1 hour and 24 minutes before sunrise on April 1 (no fooling).\u00a0 By the 30th of the month, Saturn will be rising 2 hours and 28 minutes before sunrise.\u00a0 Look for the <\/span>Ringed Planet<\/b> to be hovering over a very thin <\/span>Crescent Moon<\/b> in the ESE one hour before sunrise on April 16.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The <\/span>Lunar Cycle<\/b> finds us enjoying a <\/span>Full Moon <\/b>on April 6, followed by the <\/span>Last Quarter<\/b> on the 13th, the <\/span>New Moon <\/b>on the 20th and the <\/span>First Quarter Moon <\/b>of the new cycle on April 27th.\u00a0 The <\/span>early Crescent Moon <\/b>will be visible low in the western sky on April 21.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0If you are in need of dates to celebrate, don\u2019t forget <\/span>Earth Day <\/b>on April 22 and <\/span>International Astronomy Day<\/b> on April 29.\u00a0 If you are counting the days until the official start of summer, April 30 will put us only 52 days away from the <\/span>Summer Solstice.\u00a0 <\/b>As our daylight lengthens, it is hard to believe we were experiencing our shortest daylight hours just 130 days before April 30.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0There are two sides to the story of <\/span>Daylight Saving Time<\/b> and it is interesting to hear the reasons why some people would like to NOT change to DST each year and why some would like to keep our clocks permanently on DST (I am one of the latter not the former).\u00a0 My mother\u2019s father was a farmer and his sleep habits were controlled by sunrise and sunset while these days, we seem to be more clock driven.\u00a0 With Ontonagon County being on EST (a quirk of our state\u2019s geography), we are a little insulated from the debate but I still would prefer having the extra hour of daylight on those dark December days.\u00a0 Then again, we shouldn\u2019t complain about it getting dark at 5:30 p.m. EST in Ontonagon when our neighbors on the Michigan\/Wisconsin line a mere 45 miles south of us are getting the same darkness at 4:30 p.m. CST.\u00a0 The only thing we know for sure is the debate will go one until someone takes Taurus by the horns and settles the matter one way or the other.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0One last note on the weird object \u2018Oumuamua that zipped around the Sun in 2020.\u00a0 We covered the subject in a From the Vaults article of that same name on 4-14-21 (it can be viewed on the WOAS-FM web site <\/span>www.woas-fm.org<\/span><\/a> .\u00a0 Analysis of its unusual behavior have led to some speculation that it may be some form of alien technology like a lightsail.\u00a0 A more recent paper on \u2018Scout\u2019 (the translation of its Hawiian name) is that it was some atypical comet whose changes in velocity can be attributed to outgassing of materials even though it did not show evidence of the tail usually formed by comets as they near the Sun.\u00a0 We may never know the answer but it is always interesting to see how many theories an object like this can generate.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>Compiled by Ken Raisanen of WOAS-FM – information provided by <\/span>Abrams Planetarium Sky Calendar<\/span><\/i>, Michigan State University.\u00a0 More information and subscription information can be found on their website at <\/span>http:\/\/abramsplanetarium.org\/<\/span><\/a>skycalendar\/ or on Twitter at <\/span>http:\/\/twitter.com\/AbramsSkyNotes<\/span><\/a>.\u00a0 Yearly subscriptions cost $12 and can be started anytime.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Top Piece Video:\u00a0 How about we let The Beatles sing us into a spring like mood?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Let us start the month with the elephant in the room, or should we say in the western sky? Venus remains the star of the show, so to speak, dominating the western sky.\u00a0 After Venus and Jupiter had their very close encounter early in March, they began to drift apart\u00a0 until Jupiter dropped out of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,8,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2794","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-from-the-vaults","category-woas"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2794","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2794"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2794\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2797,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2794\/revisions\/2797"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2794"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2794"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2794"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}