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| This month’s chart shows
the sky at 9:00 PM on April 26, the night of our star party. Saturn
is well placed in two respects: (1) the planet is about 40 deg above the
western horizon, well above the low-lying distorting layers of atmosphere;
and (2) during all of April, the ring is oriented near its maximum angle
of about 27 deg with respect to our line of sight. There are other
times when we see the ring edge on, and it disappears in all but the largest
telescopes. Saturn now shines at about mag 0.1.
Jupiter continues shining brightly at mag -2.1 high in the west-southwest, about 75 deg above the horizon. We can easily see the four large moons that Galileo discovered in 1610, but we can’t see any of the tiny recently discovered moons mentioned earlier in this Newsletter. With luck, we may see Mercury shining at mag 2 about 6 deg above the WNW horizon. Tycho Brahe, the Great Dane among astronomers, is said never to have seen Mercury because he lived too far north. Have a look at the Pleiades, a near by star cluster only about 400 light years away. This is a sight that is best observed at low power, through binoculars or a finder scope. |
You can print a copy of this star chart so you can take it outside.
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