The Ellensburg, WA sky for the week of March 7, 2020

Saturday: The CWU Physics Department and the College of the Sciences is hosting its monthly First Saturday planetarium show today from noon to 1:00 p.m. Dr. Cassie Fallscheer will give a tour of the sky focusing on star death and the spring sky. Shows are free and open to all ages. There will be a show at noon on the first Saturday of every month during the academic year hosted by different CWU astronomers and astronomy educators. The CWU Lydig planetarium is room 101 in Science Phase II, just off the corner of 11th and Wildcat Way, H-11 on the campus map found at https://www.cwu.edu/facility/campus-map

Don't forget to set your clocks ahead one hour tonight for the annual ritual called daylight savings. Daylight savings originated in the United States during World War I to save energy for the war effort. But a recent study by two economists shows that switching to daylight savings time may actually lead to higher utility bills. When the economists compared the previous few years of energy bills in the section of Indiana that just started observing daylight savings, they discovered that switching to daylight savings cost Indiana utility customers $8.6 million in electricity. In an even more important consequence of daylight savings, Stanley Coren of the University of British Columbia discovered a 7% jump in traffic accidents on the Monday after we "spring ahead". Blame it on the lost hour of sleep. And, sky watchers will lose even more sleep because the sky stays light for an additional hour.

Sunday: This year, there will be two supermoon seasons. There will be Full Moon supermoons the next three months, starting tonight in the constellation Leo the lion. Then September will be the start of three months of New Moon supermoons. While the Full Moon supermoons will make a better show - you can’t see the New Moon because the dark side is facing Earth - both sets will have the same increased effect on the Earth’s tides. Read more about supermoon-o-mania at https://earthsky.org/human-world/what-is-a-supermoon?.

Monday: Two of the best, and certainly the most available, “tools” for viewing the night sky are your eyes. Your eyes let you see the entire sky in just a few seconds. Your eyes can read star charts, decipher astronomy apps, and spot meteors while your friend is still setting up her tripod. Your naked eyes are not as effective as gathering light. They work well when the light source is comparatively bright and the detailed features are fairly large. It’s best to practice on a special Solar System body known scientifically as the Magnificent Optical Object of Nearness. Artists such as Jan van Eyck and Leonardo da Vinci produced the first realistic naked eye depictions of the Magnificent Optical Object of Nearness. This week you can use your own eyes to observe evidence of violent collisions and ancient lava flows. For more information to observe the Magnificent Optical Object of Nearness, better known as the Moon, go to http://goo.gl/JLhraO.

Tuesday: “The crow rises in the southeast,” said spy number one. “I’m sorry. I don’t recognize that code,” replied spy number two. Spy one exclaimed, “That’s because it’s not a code, you idiot. I’m talking about the constellation Corvus the crow.” This very bad spy movie dialogue is to remind you that Corvus had a very bad life. According to one myth, Corvus brought the god Apollo the news that his girlfriend was seeing someone else. In a classic case of punishing the messenger, Apollo turned the formerly beautifully colored crow black. The box-shaped Corvus is one fist held upright and at arm’s length above the southeastern horizon at 11:00 p.m.

Wednesday: If you ask an astrobiologist for the three most likely places to find evidence of life in the Solar System, other than Earth, they’d probably say Mars, Europa (“Didn’t they sing “The Final Countdown”?”), and Enceladus. Mars makes sense because you know scientists have sent a lot of probes there. Astronomers first discovered strong evidence of a large water ocean on Europa, a moon of Jupiter, in 1989. However, Enceladus, one of Saturn’s moons, first piqued astrobiologists’ interest a few years ago then NASA’s Cassini probe discovered jets of water containing organic materials shooting out. Eight years ago, the German space agency started a project called Enceladus Explorer, EnEx for short, to collect samples from deep within Enceladus. For a visualization of the Enceladus mission, go to https://youtu.be/AyPoseYkI1Q. For a visualization of the three planets, look southeast at 6:00 a.m. Bright Jupiter is one fist above due southeast, Mars is a half a fist to the upper right of Jupiter and Saturn is a half a fist to the lower left of Jupiter.

Thursday: Venus is three fists above the western horizon at 8:00 p.m.

Friday: The bright star Arcturus is two and a half fists above due east at 11 p.m.

The positional information in this column about stars and planets is typically accurate for the entire week. For up to date information about the night sky, go to https://nightsky.jpl.nasa.gov/planner.cfm.