The Sky This Week 2003 30 April – 7 May 2003
The Moon returns to the evening skies this week, springing from the western horizon as a waxing crescent. First Quarter occurs on the 9th at 7:53 am Eastern Daylight Time. Look for Luna near Saturn on the evenings of the 4th and 5th. By the week’s end she’s closing in on bright Jupiter high in the south as twilight gathers.
Early risers on the morning of May 7th may want to try their hand at spotting one of Nature’s more rare events. The fleet planet Mercury will cross the face of the Sun that day, the first of only 14 such events this century. Unfortunately this particular event favors observers in the Middle East, but here in Washington we can still catch the tail end of the transit beginning at sunrise. The safest way to observe the event is to project the image of the Sun from a telescope or a pair of binoculars onto a sheet of paper. NEVER LOOK DIRECTLY AT THE SUN! Look for a small black dot close to the upper limb of the Sun as soon as you have a clear view of the blazing disc. Sunrise is at 6:05 am, and for the next 25 minutes the dot will inch slowly toward Old Sol’s edge. At 6:29 the tiny disc of Mercury will begin to egress the Sun’s face, and by 6:34 the event will be over. Our next opportunity to see part of a transit of Mercury will occur on the afternoon of November 8th, 2006, while our next chance to watch an entire transit will have to wait until May 9th, 2016!
May 1st is May Day, one of the more widely observed of the traditional ìcross-quarterî days that marked the mid-points of the astronomical seasons. We are now halfway through Spring, and this event is still a cause for celebration in Europe and the Far East. Here in the States May Day doesn’t get much notice, but we still observe Halloween and Groundhog Day, which are similar markers for the seasons of Autumn and Winter.
Saturn gets a visit from the crescent Moon on the evenings of the 4th and 5th. The ringed planet is now beating a hasty retreat from the sky, and hangs in the western sky as twilight deepens. I now have difficulty spotting him from my yard thanks to the neighborhood trees. From an open field you have about an hour to appreciate his beauty through the telescope before he settles into the turbulent air near the horizon.
Jupiter is also slipping toward the west, but he still has several weeks of glory left in his current evening apparition. He pops out of the twilight glow shortly after sunset just west of the meridian, and for the next several hours he graces the western sky. He’s still a wonderful sight in the small telescope even though his disc is now 25 percent smaller than it was at opposition.
Mars spends the week drifting through the heart of Capricornus, the Sea Goat. He’s also growing steadily brighter as Earth catches up to him for this year’s very favorable opposition. By the week’s end his disc will have grown to 10 arcseconds, the ìclassicalî limit for useful visual observations. It’s time to get your scopes tuned up for his grand show this summer!
