Welcome to the University of Texas Skywatchers Report for Monday March 14th through Sunday March 20th.
The full moon for the month of March is in the early morning hours of Friday the 18th here in Texas, so we’ll have a waxing gibbous moon for most of the work week and a waning gibbous moon for the weekend. This full moon is known as the Sap Moon, the Worm Moon, and the Lenten Moon.
The morning skies continue to be dominated by all of the planets visible to the unaided eye.
Venus is rising at 5:15 a.m. and will reach its greatest elongation from the sun on Sunday the 20th. Mars is just a few degrees to the lower right of Venus and is rising about 5 minutes after Venus this week.
Saturn is rising at 6:00 a.m. at midweek and Mercury follows at 7:05 a.m. as it continues to move back toward the Sun and its next conjunction. Jupiter is still emerging from conjunction and is rising just 20 minutes before sunrise.
The vernal equinox for the northern hemisphere occurs at 10:33 a.m. on Sunday March 20th here in central Texas marking the beginning of spring. For our friends in the southern hemisphere, it will be the autumnal equinox and the beginning of fall. This is the point where the sun crosses the celestial equator, and the amount of daylight and night are approximately equal. For the northern hemisphere the amount of daylight will continue to grow until the June solstice.
In space anniversaries this week, Thursday March 17th marks 20 years since the launch of the twin Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment spacecraft, also known as the GRACE mission. The mission was a joint effort of the University of Texas Center for Space Research, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and two German research centers. The mission mapped Earth’s gravity anomalies and how they vary over time and operated for nearly 15 years before the spacecraft reentered the Earth’s atmosphere in December 2017 and March 2018. A new mission named GRACE Follow-On was launched in May 2018 and continues to operate.
There will be no viewing on UT campus telescopes this week over Spring Break. Because of the change to Daylight Time, all viewing nights will move to 8:30 p.m. to 10:30 p.m. for the remainder of the semester. Please check back next week for more details or see our website at outreach.as.utexas.edu
Thank you for calling the University of Texas Skywatchers Report.
