Bernard Reim
March always marks the beginning of spring for us in the northern hemisphere. This year that will happen at 12:30 a.m. EDT on Sunday, March 20, one week before Easter. That event can be farther defined as the second that the sun on the ecliptic crosses over the celestial equator on an upward path. The spring and fall equinoxes are the only two days each year that the sun rises due east and sets due west for everyone on Earth except for the poles and that the days and nights will be 12 hours long.
There will be several interesting highlights this month, but you will need to travel half way around the world to see the major highlight of this month. That will be a total eclipse of the sun over Borneo and Indonesia. The shadow cone of the moon will just graze across the spherical surface of the earth touching down on the Indian Ocean a few hundred miles west of Sumatra and Malaysia. Our moon’s quarter million mile long shadow will then continue crossing over Borneo, just north of Bali and just south of the Philippines. A few hours later the shadow will lift off the surface of the earth a few hundred miles west of California in the Pacific Ocean.
Totality will last about three minutes over part of this path. That will be around 9 a.m. local time on Wednesday March 9. We are exactly 12 hours behind them, so that would be 9 p.m. on Tuesday, March 8 for us. There will be several ways you can watch a live feed of this event without going anywhere. A great website for this would be slooh.com. They will start their live coverage at 6 pm on Tuesday the 8th. I watched some of the transit of Venus on their site back on June 5 of 2012. You can also use remote controlled professional telescopes to take you own pictures of the sky through this website. They have professional astronomers like Bob Berman, who has written several books including “The Sun’s Heartbeat and other stories from the life of the star that powers our Planet.” He along with other professional astronomers like Alex Fillipenko will be watching this eclipse live in Indonesia and offering their expert commentary to make this experience more meaningful for us and to deepen our understanding of this marvelous event. Focusing on this exotic and very different part of our world for a few hours will also broaden our view of our own possibilities and raise our appreciation for our home planet, which all 7.3 billion of us share as we spiral around the sun along with our great family of planets all being flung around the center of our Milky Way galaxy at enormous speeds.
Watching this eclipse carefully will prepare us for our own total solar eclipse coming up in just over a year. That will happen on Monday, August 21 of 2017. The moon’s shadow will carve a path from Oregon to South Carolina that day, the first time in nearly a century that we enjoyed a coast to coast eclipse over this country. Then there will be another total solar eclipse over our country again less than seven years later, on April 8 of 2024. Their tracks will trace a giant X across the U.S. The center of this X will be near Carbondale in southern Illinois. Usually any given place on Earth has to wait about 400 years between total solar eclipses, and Carbondale will have two of them in less than seven years. The April 8 eclipse will be total right here in Maine over Mt. Katahdin.
Jupiter will reach opposition on March 8, the same day of the total solar eclipse. The king of the planets has been slowly and steadily getting higher and brighter in our skies over the past couple of months. Now it will rise exactly at sunset, reach its highest point in the sky at midnight, and not set until sunset. Opposition means opposite the sun from the earth. If our own shadow were long enough, it would touch Jupiter on that day. However, our shadow only reaches about one million miles into space, which is about 499 million miles short of Jupiter. Notice that Jupiter is now 2.5 times brighter than our brightest star, Sirius in Canis Major in the Winter Hexagon just two constellations to the west of Jupiter in Leo.
Mars will be the next planet to rise around midnight. The red planet will double in brightness this month and will gain 3 arc seconds in size. Then it will nearly double in size again as it reaches its own opposition on May 22. By the middle of this month, Mars will be large enough to discern some of its very interesting features in an average telescope. That would include some of its dark markings, its thin atmosphere, and its north polar icecap. Notice that Mars will be close to Antares, the brightest star in Scorpius. Its name means “rival of Mars.” They both have a similar orange color, but Mars is currently brighter than Antares, which is an incredible orange giant star about 700 times larger than our sun.
The latest discoveries from the New Horizons spacecraft during its July 14 close pass of Pluto and Charon just showed that Pluto has shield volcanoes similar to the ones on Mars. They would be called cryovolcanoes on Pluto because it is much too cold for lava at 380 degrees below zero F. They probably used to erupt a slurry of melted ices instead of molten rock like on Earth and Mars. Pluto’s atmosphere is much colder and denser than predicted and very little of it is escaping into space.
Then Saturn rises about one hour after Mars. Keep in mind that the ringed planet is also getting closer and brighter each morning, approaching its own opposition on June 4.
Then brilliant Venus will rise just one hour before the sun. Mercury has already dropped out of the great line up of all 5 planets in the morning sky, but it is still fairly unusual to see 4 of the 5 brightest planets all lined up in either the morning or evening sky. We will lose Venus as a morning object by the end of this month, leaving just 3 bright planets in the morning sky.
Not one, but two comets will be visible this month in a telescope at about 8th magnitude. They will trace out very similar paths in the sky. Comet Catalina is moving from Perseus to Camelopardalis this month and Comet Ikeya- Murakami is moving through Leo the lion near Jupiter. Comet Catalina is on a hyperbolic orbit taking it right out of our solar system and the other comet swings past our sun every 5.4 years. It will be between two open star clusters in Perseus during the end of this month. At the same time, the other comet will be near a bright spiral galaxy in Leo.
March 1: Last quarter moon was at 6: 11 p.m. EST.
March 2: Pioneer 10 was launched on this day in 1972. It sent its last signal back to us 13 years ago and is now over 10 billion miles away or about 100 a.u., which is the average distance of the earth to the sun. It is beyond the heliopause, where the sun’s influence ends and interstellar space begins. This was also the first spacecraft to carry an intentional message to other civilizations. The moon passes four degrees north of Saturn this morning at 2 a.m.
March 8: Jupiter is at opposition at 6 am today. New moon is at 8:54 p.m. There will be a total solar eclipse over Indonesia tonight at that time, which is 12 hours later over there. We are in an eclipse season again. The last eclipse we had was that wonderful total lunar eclipse of the super harvest moon on Sept 27 of last year, easily visible to everyone here in primetime.
March 10: The moon is at perigee, or closest to the earth at 223,389 miles.
March 13: Daylight Saving Time begins this morning at 2 am. William Herschel discovered the planet Uranus on this day in 1781. Neptune would be predicted mathematically and then discovered in 1846.
March 14: Albert Einstein was born on this day in 1879. The recent discovery of gravitational waves further vindicates another amazing prediction of his General Theory of Relativity, which was published just over 100 years ago. The moon passes near Aldebaran in Taurus tonight.
March 15: First quarter moon is at 1:03 p.m. EDT.
March 16: Caroline Herschel, the sister of William, was born on this day in 1750. She was an accomplished astronomer in her own right, having discovered many of the star clusters and nebulae in the Herschel catalogue along with 8 new comets, 6 of which still bear her name.
March 20: The vernal equinox is at 12:30 a.m. EDT.
March 21: The moon passes two degrees south of Jupiter tonight.
March 22: Comet Hale Bopp was closest to Earth on this day in 1997.
March 23: Full moon is at 8:01 a.m. This is also called the Worm, Lenten, Crow, or Sap Moon. A penumbral lunar eclipse will happen, but we will not notice it.
March 25: Saturn ends its direct, eastward motion and begins its retrograde loop today.
March 28: The moon passes 4 degrees north of Mars today.
March 29: The moon passes 3 degrees north of Saturn today.
March 31: Last quarter moon is at 11:17 a.m. EDT.
— Bernie Reim is an amateur astronomer and teaches astronomy lab courses at the University of Southern Maine.
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