The full Moon will wash out some of the dimmer meteors, but fortunately there are plenty of other stargazing highlights in this week’s stargazing podcast guide, Star Diary, 22 to 28 April 2024.
Chris: Hello and welcome to Star Diary, the podcast from the makers of BBC Sky at Night Magazine. You can subscribe to the digital edition of the magazine by visiting iTunes, Google Play, or Apple News, or to the print edition by visiting skyatnightmagazine.com.
Ezzy: Greetings listeners. And welcome to Star Diary, a weekly guide to the best things to see in the northern hemisphere’s night sky. As we are based here in the UK, all times are in BST. In this episode, we’ll be covering the coming week from 22 to 28 April. I’m Ezzy Pearson, and back on the podcast this week is Mary McIntyre, an outreach astronomer and communicator.
Hello again, Mary.
Mary: Hi, Ezzy. It’s great to be back.
Ezzy: Yes, it’s great to have you back. So, what do we have coming up in this week’s night skies?
Mary: Well, this week is our last chance to observe Jupiter and Uranus for a while, but we can see four asteroids, which I’ll talk about in a minute. We’ve got a full Moon coming up and some less well known clair obscur effects, lots of conjunctions and a couple of comets and a challenging meteor shower. So quite a busy week.
Ezzy: I like that, a challenging meteor shower.
Listen to last week’s episode, Star Diary 15 to 21 April 2024
Mary: I’m going to start with the planets, which won’t take long because there’s not a lot going on at the moment with planets. But in the evening sky, our very last chance really to start seeing Jupiter and Uranus. They’re very close to each other at the moment.
They’re going to be low in the west northwest after sunset all of this week. Jupiter is about mag -2.0, but it’s going to be lost in the evening twilight a little bit and very, very low. Uranus at mag +5.9, you’re going to need binoculars to spot that, but they’re kind of lying between the boundary of Aries and Taurus at the moment, so look for those while we still can.
On 22 April at 9:30PM, Jupiter is 3.5º above the horizon, so you’re going to need a clear horizon to spot that. That’s very, very low. And Uranus is only 35 arc minutes away. So they are incredibly close, like kind of same field of view with most telescopes.
But it’s going to be a challenge to see Uranus in those conditions being so low down. But with a telescope, you do have a chance.
That’s kind of it for the bright planets. So not overly exciting, but we do have a couple of asteroids, three asteroids, in fact, in the evening sky. First one is Pallas, which is at opposition, so that’s actually visible all night long in Hercules.
That’s about mag +9.0, so all asteroids really are going to be binocular, small telescope kind of objects. Once you’ve memorised the star field, you should be able to spot the asteroid and then over the coming days you can see that it has moved against the background stars. So although they are just like a star like dot, I do find it really exciting to actually monitor their movement and see what they’re up to.
You know, there’s a big asteroid belt out there and I think it’s cool that with amateur equipment we can actually see some of those. So that is in Hercules, which is a fairly faint constellation.
Vesta, 4 Vesta is currently at mag +8.3, so a little bit brighter, and that lies in Gemini at the moment.
So that is setting at around two o’clock in the morning over in the northwestern sky. Vesta is a little bit easier to see than Pallas, But kind of, they’re very similar in magnitude. So with binoculars, you should spot them.
And below Leo, we’ve got 3 Juno, which is a bit fainter at mag +10.0. So again, definitely big binoculars, small telescope territory, but that’s lying below Leo setting at about 4:15 in the morning. All three of those kind of visible at the same time in different parts of the sky, I think it’s really awesome. With all of those, just monitor how they’ve moved over the days. And it’s really interesting to do that.
Ezzy: I do think that’s one of the things that’s really… because as you said, asteroids, they are just dots of light on the night sky, so just looking at them by themselves isn’t that interesting.
It’s when you look at them in the grand scheme of things and see them all moving across the night sky together, comparing them night after night. Doing those comparisons like they used to, where how they actually found these asteroids was by using a thing called a blink comparator where they basically flicked back and forth between two pictures and tried to see what was moving.
I think that’s just a really nice thing that you can do at home for yourself if you want to.
Mary: It is. I’ve done it several times actually, and it’s really interesting to just see the movement over even just a day and one. And it helps you also to get to grips with the star field in an area of sky. We kind of get quite good at looking at constellations naked eye but through binoculars there’s a whole other load of stars to look at and I think it’s really good to familiarise yourself with that.
In the morning sky, we don’t have any bright planets visible, but we do have 2 Ceres, another asteroid that is mag +8.6, and that is gunna lie to the left of The Teapot. The Teapot asterism in Sagittarius rising at about 2:30 in the morning, so it’s still a kind of pre dawn object at this time of year. You can look for Ceres in that area of the sky as well, and like with the other asteroids, monitor how it moves over time.
So that’s kind of it for the planet, so I’m going to move on and talk about some Moon stuff and some nice lunar conjunctions we have coming up. This week the Moon is heading towards a full Moon, which we’re going to have close to midnight on Tuesday 23 April into Wednesday 24 April that morning.
The full Moon this week is the Pink Moon, which is the name that was given by the Native American almanacs. named for the pink wildflowers, there’s a type of phlox that blossoms at this time of year in Native America. So the names I think are quite nice, I know some people get funny about it, but it’s an important part of history and how we used to use the Moon as the only way of marking the passage of time.
They didn’t just name the full Moon, it was the whole of that Moon cycle was the Pink Moon. So calling them by those names I think is really nice and gives us a connection to that.
Ezzy: Some people, especially when it’s called something like the Pink Moon or the Strawberry Moon, you think it might be something to do, like, does it change color at that time of year? And no, it doesn’t.
But it is, as you say, this is how people for millennia, since before even we have written records, people were using the Moon to keep track of what was going on in the night sky. It was very important that people knew what time of year it was because they needed to know when’s the right time to plant their grain. Which is why you have the Corn Moon, because It was to do with the cycle of the elements and the seasons, so it is a very important part of our history that I think it is important to remember.
Mary: Yeah, I really like the Moons. Different cultures have different names for the full Moon as well, which is a whole other wormhole to drop down, but I just really love that stuff. And they used to have these little hand painted, folding farmer’s calendars, which were a pocket calendar to remind farmers how many hours of daylight that month, what jobs to do, and all connected to the Moon. I think that’s really beautiful.
So, we do have that happening this week, but the day before full Moon on 22 April at half nine in the evening, the nearly full Moon is just 3º from Spica, so that’s a nice close conjunction. Then at five o’clock in the morning on 23 April, the almost full Moon is very close to speaker, and that night it’s just 9 arc minutes away.
As you kind of go through that night and look at it again in the early hours of the morning you can see because the Moon and the stars are moving at different rates, the gap has closed up quite a lot in those hours. I always think it’s really interesting to look at something a few hours apart and see how things have changed, so that’s a good one to do that with.
So yeah, from Oxford they’re only 9 arc minutes apart, which is close to actually being an occultation, but it doesn’t occult this time.
On 24 April at 11 o’clock at night, we have the clair osbcur effect called the Zeno Steps. So you need a telescope for this one. It’s one of the less well known clair obscur effects, the French for light and shade, where the way that sunlight hits highlights and shadows can create these shapes that we’ve named.
And near crater Zeno, when the angle of sunlight is just right, there are a series of kind of horizontal lines that look like a set of steps when they’re illuminated by the Sun at the right angle. So you can see that at 11 o’clock on 24th. On 25 April at 3:30 in the morning, the waning gibbous Moon is about halfway between Zubenelgenubi and Brachium in Libra.
I love Zubenelgenubi as a name: I think it’s my favourite star name. A lot of the Arabic names are awesome.
Ezzy: It is one of those ones that I don’t think I’m ever going to forget how to spell that. There are certain ones of those names that when you’ve had to do the job that I do and you’ve had to write and correct them so many times, they’re just in there forever.
And Zubenelgenubi is one of them.
Mary: Yeah, it’s just such a great name. And then the Moon kind of lying exactly halfway between two stars, I think is always nice. And the day after that on 26 April at 3:30 in the morning, the 95% waning Moon is just to the right of the claw of Scorpius.
So I think I mentioned this a few weeks ago, but I really love it when we start to see the claw of Scorpius appearing in our dawn skies. It really makes me think summer is almost here.
The day after that, the Moon is just 2 degrees 52 minutes away from Antares in Scorpius, so it’s even closer that night. So you can kind of see the Moon moving through the claw towards Antares over those two mornings. So there’s a lot of lunar stuff happening, lots of lunar pairings this week to look for.
We have a couple of comets visible this month as well. Although we’ve lost Comet Pons-Brooks there are two other comets that are still achievable with large binoculars or a small telescope, and the first one is 13P/Olbers. That is moving through Taurus this week, and so we can see that around about 10 o’clock at night, 12º above the west northwest horizon.
That is going to reach peak magnitude on 1 July, so it’s currently about mag +9.0 and will be brightening. But as we all know, comets do whatever they like and they don’t necessarily follow the predicted like curve. So you never know when one is gonna have some kind of outburst and suddenly be brighter or have a tail disconnection or whatever.
So, they’re just really fun to observe.
Ezzy: Always, always gotta keep on them. And even if you can’t see them, there’s be other people watching them. So you can always talk to your fellow astronomers and see what’s going on with it.
Mary: One of the most important things actually for pro-am collaborations because there aren’t enough astronomers to study all the comets all of the time and they very often are a one and done for us in our lifetime.
Ezzy: It’s the thing that a lot of people outside of astronomy don’t really realise that the thing that a lot of professional astronomers lack is time. You only get so many hours on these massive fancy telescopes. Yes, they’re a lot bigger, they can see some amazing things, but you can only use them for so long.
Whereas amateurs and people using telescopes in their back garden, you can just look at whatever you like for as long as you like, as long as the weather’s good and it’s in the sky at the right time. So there’s some amazing things that people can do.
Mary: Yeah, if you kind of get into photometry a little bit as well, you can actually really get into the science of monitoring how bright something is, and it’s good for variable stars and for comets.
And you may find that the comet has just got brighter for a couple of hours and then it dims again. And if you’re not looking at it all the time, you would miss that. So it is super important to kind of get out there. Comet C/2021 S3 PanSTARRS is still visible. It’s moving through Cygnus this week and on 23 April it’s going to be just above the Crescent Nebula.
I do love a deep sky comet conjunction, so I think that will be beautiful. On 27th it’s going to lie quite close to the star Sadr in Cygnus. There’s loads of nebulosity in that area, so if you are an astrophotographer kind of doing long exposure pictures in that area, there’s going to be so much kind of red gas and dust from within Cygnus, all kind of blended in with the comet.
So they can make for a really beautiful colour comparison, because comets very often do look green in photographs. That comet is fading, it’s past its peak magnitude, but it should still be around mag +10.0, which is definitely achievable if you do photography, bigger telescopes. Again, comets don’t look like they’re doing photographs, they are just a little smudge, but they are still really cool to observe properly.
Ezzy: I think they’re also one of those ones where if you can look at it visually and photograph it and it’s a really good way to compare what you can see between the two different ones. So quite often in photographs you can pick up some colour and a lot more of what’s going on with the tails whereas as you say even with a big telescope quite often comets just look like smudges.
Mary: They do, they’ve got a low surface brightness very often like galaxies so they are just a little tiny smudge but when you think about where it’s come from.
Ezzy: But you’re still seeing a comet.
Mary: Yeah.
Ezzy: And you’re seeing it with your eyes.
Mary: There’s nothing that compares to that for me. So the last thing I want to talk about is the Lyrids meteor shower.
So this shower is active from 14 to 30 April and the peak is overnight on 22/23 April. Which unfortunately coincides with a full Moon, which is never good news for a meteor shower.
This shower is actually debris from Comet C/1861 G1 Thatcher, and that’s shower was actually first recorded in 687 BC. So it’s actually the oldest meteor shower that has been recorded that we can still observe today, which I think is pretty awesome.
Now the old meteor showers have a higher rate before dawn because that dawn side of the Earth is actually facing the debris stream left behind by the comet, so the rates are higher, but also the Lyrids meteor shower radiant is higher as the night goes on.
So although there is a full Moon, it’s going to wash out all the faint and meteors, you never know with a meteor shower whether you’re going to get any fireballs, whether there’s a cluster of debris that we don’t know about. And actually recording visually how many meteors you see, even if you see almost nothing, that’s still valuable to meteor science because knowing the shape and size of the debris stream, a no show is just as important as an outburst.
Although we’re not going to see the faint stuff because of the full Moon, it’s definitely still worth getting out there and looking. And look away from the radiant. Don’t be tempted to look at the radiant, because the trails of meteors are longer if you are further away from the radiant, and that will take you away from where the full Moon is as well.
So if you can look to the northern sky, I think you’ll have more chance of seeing something.
Ezzy: Yes, that’s another area where pro-am collaboration is a huge thing because they have the time to just go out and view things over time. We actually covered this back on our 8 to 14 April episode when the Lyrid shower was just beginning and then we advised people, you know, if you’re interested in this watching things throughout the entire shower, that’s really useful. Not just watching these things at the peak, but trying to see if you can find any of these Lyrids in the run up is also really important as well.
And if anybody is interested in getting a bit more in depth with that kind of research and actually sort of trying to track meteor showers, we have details on how to do that over on our website, skyatnightmagazine. com. I’ll put a link to it in the show notes as well, so you’ll be able to find it straight away. But really is something interesting and helpful that people can do just from your back garden with a notepad and a pen and your eyes. That’s all you need.
Chris: And a flask of hot chocolate.
Ezzy: And a flask of hot chocolate. I was about to add that as well. The most important part of any astronomical adventure.
Mary: Absolutely.
Ezzy: Well, that is certainly a very packed week. So thank you for taking us through all of that, Mary. To all of our listeners, we hope to see you back here next week. Please do subscribe to the podcast to make sure you keep up to date with all of the latest updates.
But just to summarise that week again, beginning with the planets in the evening sky throughout the week, it’s going to be your last chance to see Uranus and Jupiter. Jupiter is quite low and Uranus you will still need binoculars for. On 22nd, Jupiter will just be 3.5º above the horizon, but Uranus will be very close to it.
There’s also a couple of asteroids in the evening sky. We have Pallas in Hercules, Vesta in Gemini, Juno in Leo, and also in the morning, Ceres will be in The Teapot as well.
Moving on to the Moon, the Moon will be heading towards full in the middle of the week, but on 22 April, the Moon will appear near Spica, and the two will move even closer together by 23rd.
24th gives a good opportunity to see the clair obscur effect, the Zeno Steps.
25th, we’ll see the Moon caught between Zubenelgenubi and Brachium in Libra.
And from 26th into 27th, you can see the Moon passing across the claw of Scorpius, moving closer to Antares.
In terms of comets, we’ve got two on the go at the moment.
13P Olbers will be moving through Taurus.
S3 PanSTARRS in Cygnus might be fading away, but on 23rd it will be in the Crescent Nebula, and on 27th it will be near the star Sadr as well.
And finally, on 22 to 23rd, we have the Lyrids meteor shower will be reaching its peak. That’s been going on for several weeks already, but it will be peaking on that night as well.
So lots and lots of things to look out for in this week’s night sky, and we hope to see you back here next week for even more stargazing highlights on Star Diary.
Thank you for joining us.
If you want to find out even more spectacular sights that will be gracing the night’s sky this month, be sure to pick up a copy of BBC Sky at Night Magazine, where we have a 16 page pull out sky guide, with a full overview of everything worth looking up for throughout the whole month. Whether you like to look at the Moon, the planets, or the deep sky, whether you use binoculars, telescopes, or neither, our Sky Guide has got you covered, with detailed star charts to help you track your way across the night sky.
From all of us here at BBC Sky at Night Magazine, goodbye.
Chris: Thank you for listening to this episode of the Star Diary podcast from the makers of BBC Sky at Night Magazine, which was edited by Lewis Dobbs. For more of our podcasts, visit our website at skyatnightmagazine.com/podcasts, or head to Spotify, iTunes, or your favourite podcast player.