Elusive Mercury is second evening star alongside Venus
Orion is striding proudly across the meridian as darkness falls, but, even before the twilight dims, we have our best chances this year to spot Mercury low down in the west and close to the more familiar brilliant planet Venus.
Both evening stars lie within the same field-of-view in binoculars for much of March, so the fainter Mercury should be relatively easy to locate using Venus as a guide. Provided, of course, that we have an unobstructed horizon.
Mercury never strays far from the Sun’s glare, making it the most elusive of the naked-eye planets – indeed, it is claimed that many astronomers, including Copernicus, never saw it.
Blazing at magnitude -3.9, Venus hovers only 9° above Edinburgh’s western horizon at sunset on the 1st and sets 64 minutes later. Mercury, one tenth as bright at magnitude -1.3, lies 2.0° (four Moon-breadths) below and to its right and may be glimpsed through binoculars as the twilight fades. Mercury stands 1.1° to the right of Venus on the 3rd and soon becomes a naked eye object as both planets stand higher from night to night, becoming visible until later in the darkening sky.
By the 15th, Mercury lies 4° above-right of Venus and at its maximum angle of 18° from the Sun, although it has more than halved in brightness to magnitude 0.2. The slender young Moon sits 5° below-left of Venus on the 18th and 11° above-left of the planetary pairing on the 19th. Earthshine, “the old Moon in the new Moon’s arms”, should be a striking sight over the following few evenings.
On the 22nd, the 30 per cent illuminated Moon creeps through the V-shaped Hyades star cluster and hides (occults) Taurus’ leading star Aldebaran between 23:31 and 00:14 as they sink low into Edinburgh’s west-north-western sky.
Falling back towards the Sun, Mercury fades sharply to magnitude 1.4 by the 22nd when it passes 5° right of Venus and becomes lost from view in the following week. At the month’s end, Venus stands 15° high at sunset and sets two hours later. The Sun climbs 12° northwards in March to cross the sky’s equator at the vernal equinox at 16:15 on the 20th, which is five days before we set our clocks forward at the start of British Summer Time. Sunrise/sunset times for Edinburgh change from 07:04/17:47 GMT on the 1st to 06:46/19:49 BST (05:46/18:49 GMT) on the 31st. The Moon is full on the 2nd, at last quarter on the 9th, new on the 17th, at first quarter on the 24th and full again on the 31st.
Orion is sinking to our western horizon at our star map times while the Plough, the asterism formed by the brighter stars of Ursa Major, is soaring high in the east towards the zenith. To the south of Ursa Major, and just reaching our meridian, is Leo which is said to represent the Nemean lion strangled by Hercules (aka Heracles) in the first of his twelve labours. Leo appears to be facing west and squatting in a similar pose to that of the lions at the foot of Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square.
Leo’s Sickle, the reversed question mark that curls above Leo’s brightest star
Regulus, outlines its head and mane and contains the famous double star Algieba whose two component stars, both much larger than our Sun, take more than 500 years to orbit each other and may be seen through a small telescope. Regulus, itself, lies just left of the Moon tonight and is occulted as they sink towards Edinburgh’s western horizon at 06:02 tomorrow morning.
Jupiter, easily our brightest morning object, rises at Edinburgh’s east-south-eastern horizon at 00:47 GMT tomorrow and at 23:41 BST (22:41 GMT) on the 31st, climbing to pass around 17° high in the south some four hours later. Brightening from magnitude -2.2 to -2.4, it is slow moving in Libra, being stationary on the 9th when its motion reverses from easterly to westerly. Jupiter is obvious below the Moon on the 7th when a telescope shows the Jovian disk to be 40 arcseconds wide.
If we look below and to the left of Jupiter in the south before dawn, the three objects that catch our attention are the red supergiant star Antares in Scorpius and, further from Jupiter, the planets Mars and Saturn.
Mars lies in southern Ophiuchus, between Antares and Saturn, and is heading eastwards into Sagittarius and towards a conjunction with Saturn in early April. The angle between the two planets falls from 17° to only 1.5° this month as Mars brightens from magnitude 0.8 to 0.3 and its distance falls from 210 million to 166 million km. Mars’ disk swells from 6.7 to 8.4 arcseconds, becoming large enough for surface detail to be visible through decent telescopes. Sadly, Mars (like Saturn) is so far south and so low in Scotland’s sky that the “seeing” is unlikely to be crisp and sharp.
Incidentally, on the morning of the 19th, Mars passes between two of the southern sky’s showpiece objects, being a Moon’s breadth below the Trifid Nebula and twice this distance above the Lagoon Nebula. Both glowing clouds of hydrogen, dust and young stars appear as hazy patches through binoculars but are stunning in photographs.
Saturn, creeping eastwards just above the Teapot of Sagittarius, improves from magnitude 0.6 to 0.5 and has a 16 arcseconds disk set within its superb rings which span 37 arcseconds at midmonth and have their northern face tipped towards us at 26°. The waning Moon lies above-left of Mars on the 10th and close to Saturn on the 11th.