Saturday 6 March 2010

The Night Sky for March, 2010

March is one of the best times of the year for astronomy, simply because there is so much to see!

Orion and Taurus – along with all the amazing objects that surround that part of the sky, such as Orion's nebula, Betelgeuse, the Pleiades - are visible in the evening, and as they set by midnight, the summer highlights begin to rise in the east – Hercules, the Great Globular cluster, with Vega and the rest of the summer triangle on their way from the morning sky into the evening sky, signalling that summer is not far away.

We can see both Mars and Saturn throughout the night, with the latter rising at sunset. The Moon glides under Mars on the 25th March, and then passes under Saturn a few days later on the 29th. Both Mars and Saturn are quite bright, so they are easy to spot.

For more details, I recommend you use the free planetarium software Stellarium – you can download it for Macs, Windows or Linux.

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