The Ellensburg, WA sky for the week of March 28, 2020

Saturday:  Venus is at its brightest this orbital cycle. You can’t miss it, three and a half fists held upright and at arm’s length above the western horizon. Comet Atlas is not at its brightest yet. That time will come in mid- to late May. For now Comet ATLAS (C/2019 Y4) is making its way into binocular range. At 9:30 p.m., it is six and a half fists held upright and at arm’s length above the northern horizon and two fists above the North Star. The easiest way to find it with binoculars is to first center on the North Star and then move your binoculars straight up, about two or three binocular fields of view for typical 10X50 binoculars. If you have a super fancy app, search for a star called HR 3182. It will be in the same binocular field of view as that.

For more information about the comet, and a basic map on how to find it over the next month, go to https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/comet-atlas-will-it-become-a-naked-eye-object/. 

Sunday: Aldebaran and the Hyades Cluster are one fist below the crescent Moon, three fists above the western horizon at 9:00 p.m. The stars in the Hyades Cluster are all young, as stars are judged, formed in the same cloud of gas and dust a few hundred million years ago. But just as children move away from home, the stars of the Hyades Cluster are slowly drifting apart. Millennia from now, future sky watchers will see these stars as random points of light in the sky and not as a family. I hope they at least call home every so often. For more information, go to https://www.skyandtelescope.com/astronomy-news/end-hyades-star-cluster/.

Monday: Mars and Saturn are about a thumb width apart from each other with Mars looking slightly reddish and Saturn looking slightly yellowish. (Is that even a word?) The much brighter Jupiter is less than a fist to the east of them. All of them are one fist above the southeastern horizon at 6:00 a.m.

Tuesday:  Global Astronomy Month starts tomorrow with a kickoff Facebook Live event at 10:00 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time. Project coordinators from different parts of the world will talk about what is happening in astronomy in their region. The first big virtual observing event is Friday morning, viewing Venus in the Pleiades. For more information and a schedule of events, go to

https://astronomerswithoutborders.org/gam2020-programs/program-schedule-2020.html.

Wednesday: The Milky Way is pretty easy to spot on the early spring sky. Just look up. Everything you see in the sky, including that bird that just startled you, is in the Milky Way. But, even the path of densely packed stars in the plane of our galaxy that look like a river of milk is easy to find. Face due west at 9:00 p.m. in a fairly open area. The fuzzy Milky Way path starts due south, moves upward past the bright star Sirius, towards the bright star Capella, through W-shaped Cassiopeia and down to due north where the bright star Deneb sits just above the horizon.

Thursday: Last night you looked at something fuzzy. So reward yourself tonight by looking at something sharp and detailed. The OSIRIS-REx mission has just sent back the highest resolution global map of any Solar System object, the asteroid Bennu. Using pictures taken from just three to five kilometers above the surface, the map has a resolution of five centimeters per pixel. For more information about the mission, as well as the detailed images, go to https://www.asteroidmission.org/.

Friday: It is often said that Earth is a water world because about 70% of the Earth’s surface is covered by water. What would it look like if all that water on the surface were gathered up into a ball? That “ball” would be about 700 km in diameter, less than half the diameter of the Moon. The Astronomy Picture of the day shows us right here https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap120515.html.

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.