By Peter Forrester | March 1, 2019
Greetings on this fine morning! Don’t forget Daylight Savings starts on Sunday, March 10.
Here are your March skywatching events, courtesy of skymaps.com:
Friday, March 1: Moon near Saturn, 2:00 PM, visible from Southwestern US.
Saturday, March 2: Moon near Venus, 6:00 PM (the planet is bright, magnitude -4.1).
Monday, March 4: Moon at apogee (farthest from Earth) at 6:00 AM.
Wednesday, March 6: New Moon at 11:04 AM.
Monday, March 11: Moon near Mars in the evening sky, 1:00 PM.
Thursday, March 14: First Quarter Moon, 6:26 AM.
Tuesday, March 19: Moon at perigee (closest to Earth) at 3:35 PM.
Wednesday, March 20: Vernal Equinox at 6:01 PM. An important event, this is the astronomical start of spring in the Northern Hemisphere, where the Sun crosses into the Northern Celestial Hemisphere. See the Wikipedia links below for more information.
Also on March 20, Full Moon at 9:42 PM.
Thursday, March 28: Last Quarter Moon at 12:10 AM.
Sunday, March 31: Mars 3 degrees from the Pleiades cluster at 3 AM.
Also there are other events I skipped involving the Moon being seen near other objects after the 11th of March. I really can’t exaggerate too much the value I’ve found from the free monthly downloads from skymaps.com. If you haven’t been to this site I highly recommend it.
One note on using skymaps – they give all their times in UTC (Coordinated Universal Time), also called Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) in English-speaking countries. This is the time in Greenwich, England. In the US Eastern Time Zone, our time is 5 hours before UTC when we are in Standard Time, and 4 hours before during Daylight Savings. I have been translating the times for you, but if you are looking at their information you will need to be able to convert the time yourself.
With all this, you ought to have another great month of looking at the stars. I wish you all the best, and looking forward to warmer weather with the start of spring this month!
Previous in series: Skies Over Milton, February Edition
References:
Thalassoudis, Kym. (2000-18). Skymaps. Retrieved March 1, 2019 from skymaps.com.
Wikipedia. (2019, February 27). Coordinated Universal Time. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_Universal_Time.
Wikipedia. (2019, February 27). Daylight saving time. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time.
Wikipedia. (2019, February 28). Daylight saving time in the United States. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time_in_the_United_States.
Wikipedia. (2019, February 19). March equinox. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_equinox.
Wikipedia. (2019, February 28). Pleiades. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleiades.
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