The Ellensburg, WA sky for the week of April 4, 2020

Saturday:  The CWU campus is closed. But astronomy learning lives on! The Physics Department and the College of the Sciences is hosting a First Saturday VIRTUAL planetarium show today from noon to 1 p.m. CWU professor Bruce Palmquist will give a tour of the spring sky using the browser-based program Stellarium Web. There will be a virtual planetarium show on the first Saturday of every month for the rest of the school year. Stay at home, practice good social distancing, and visit https://cwu.zoom.us/j/319735379 to participate in the Virtual tour.

Sunday: The open star cluster called the Pleiades is right below Venus, two and a half fists held upright and at arm’s length above the western horizon at 9:00 p.m.

Monday: Orion stands prominent in the southwestern sky. At 9:00 p.m., the middle of Orion’s belt is two and a half fists held upright and at arm’s length above the horizon. And talk about belt tightening! Alnilam, the middle star in the belt, is losing mass at a rate of about 100 thousand trillion tons a day. That’s a 1 followed by 17 zeros tons per day.

Tuesday: Tonight is the largest full Moon of the year. You may go outside and watch it alone. But learning is more fun when there are others around, even if they are just with you online. Join astrophysicist Gianluca Masi at 10:00 a.m., Pacific Standard Time, when he and the Virtual Telescope Project will host a webcast to watch this Supermoon rise above the skyline of Rome. Read about this and other Global Astronomy Month events at 

https://astronomerswithoutborders.org/gam2020-programs/online/5382-supermoon-the-largest-full-moon-of-the-year.html.

Wednesday: The Stargate movies and TV shows have access to a portal to other planets. Harry Potter has access to a portal to the Chamber of Secrets. You have access to a Portal to the Universe. This portal is not in Moaning Myrtle’s bathroom but is on the web at http://www.portaltotheuniverse.org/. It is a repository of up-to-date astronomy news, blogs, and podcasts. A recent story highlights how slime mold is helping astronomers map the largest structures in the universe. Slime mold builds large complex networks in its effort to find food. Gravity also forms a large complex network of filaments tying galaxies together. Scientists wrote a computer algorithm to model slime mold behavior and then used it to model the cosmic gravity web. For more information about slime mold scientists, go to https://www.spacetelescope.org/news/heic2003/. 

Thursday: You probably didn’t know this but several British New Wave bands were really into astronomy. Take the band “Dead or Alive” (please). The original lyrics to their song “You Spin Me Round (Like a Record) were actually: “You spin me right round, baby, right round, like the Whirlpool Galaxy, right round, round, round.” (Well, that’s what I thought they were.) The Whirlpool Galaxy was the first galaxy observed to have a spiral shape. Since then, astronomers have discovered many galaxies, including our own Milky Way Galaxy, have a spiral shape. Go to http://www.spacetelescope.org/images/heic0506a/ for more information about the Whirlpool Galaxy. Go to your small telescope to find the Whirlpool Galaxy in the night sky. It is in the constellation Canes Venatici, the hunting dogs. At 10:00 p.m., find Alkaid, the end star of the Big Dipper handle, five and a half fists above the east-northeastern horizon. The Whirlpool Galaxy is two fingers to the upper right of Alkaid.

Friday: Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars are in a line a little over one fist long that is about one and a half fists above the southeastern horizon at 5:30 a.m. Reddish Mars is on the left and bright Jupiter is on the right.

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.