FRIDAY, MARCH 13
■ Jupiter shines in central Gemini. It’s still between the hip stars of the stick-figure twins, as shown below in late twilight. To see all the stars of the figures (light pollution permitting) wait until after full dark.
■ Big Dipper lore: The Big Dipper glitters softly high in the northeast these evenings, standing on its handle as shown below. You probably know that the two stars forming the front of the Dipper’s bowl (currently on top) are the Pointers; they point to Polaris, currently to their left.
And you may know that if you follow the curve of the Dipper’s handle out and around by a little more than a Dipper length, you’ll arc to Arcturus, now just rising in the east-northeast.
But did you know that if you follow the Pointers backward the opposite way, you’ll land in Leo? Go four or five fists at arm’s length.
Draw a line diagonally across the Dipper’s bowl from where the handle is attached, continue far on, and you go to Gemini (about four fists).
And look at the two stars forming the open top of the Dipper’s bowl. Follow this line past the bowl’s lip up far across the sky, and you cruise to Capella (about five fists).
SATURDAY, MARCH 14
■ Little Dipper lore: Use the Pointer stars atop the Big Dipper to locate Polaris three fists to their left. It’s the end of the Little Dipper’s handle, as shown above.
Polaris is a respectable 2nd magnitude. But other than Polaris, all you may see of the Little Dipper through light pollution are the two stars forming the outer edge of its bowl: Kochab (also 2nd magnitude) and below it Pherkad, 3rd magnitude. Find these two “Guardians of the Pole” about a fist and a half at arm’s length to Polaris’s lower right.
They’re called the Guardians because they forever march around and around Polaris, which very nearly marks the North Celestial Pole.
Now is the time of year when the two Guardians line up vertically just after twilight ends.
SUNDAY, MARCH 15
■ We’re only five days from the official (astronomical) beginning of spring. Earth will cross the March equinox point in its orbit on March 20th this year, at 10:46 a.m. EDT.
■ On the traditional divide between the winter and spring sky lies the dim constellation Cancer. It’s now very high toward the south-southeast in early evening, between Gemini to its west and Leo to its east.
Cancer holds something unique in its middle: the Beehive Star Cluster, M44. The Beehive shows dimly to the naked eye if you have little or no light pollution. Where to look? M44 is a little less than halfway from Pollux in Gemini to Regulus in Leo, as shown below. With binoculars it’s pretty easy to spot, even under mediocre sky conditions. Look for a scattered clump of faint little stars, magnitudes 6½ on down.
Use a telescope to hunt out the much smaller, fainter open cluster M67 some 9° south of the Beehive. M67 lies 1.8° due west of 4th-magnitude Alpha Cancri, as shown below.
The Beehive star cluster M44 is usually easy in binocs. Find it about 40% of the way from Pollux to Regulus and a bit south. This month it’s also, more simply, halfway from Jupiter to Regulus.
M67, fainter and about five times farther but richer in stars, requires a telescope. The stars in M67 are often used to find the limiting magnitude of your telescope or narrow-field photographic setup, using this chart. I’ve managed to glimpse the mag 14.96 star there with my 12.5-inch reflector at 450x through suburban light pollution.
MONDAY, MARCH 16
■ These moonless nights are a fine time to collect some telescopic triple stars with Bob King’s guide to 17 of them for this time of year: Winter’s Finest Triple Stars, with finder charts and data about each. Iota Cancri and Beta Mon are famous among amateur astronomers. Bet you didn’t know about the others.
■ Algol should at mid-eclipse, magnitude 3.4 instead of its usual 2.1, for a couple hours centered on 8:57 p.m. EDT.
TUESDAY, MARCH 17
■ This is the time of year when Orion declines in the southwest through the evening, with his Belt roughly horizontal. But when will Orion’s Belt appear exactly horizontal? That depends mostly on your latitude, but also on where you’re located east-west in your time zone.
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 18
■ Bright Sirius now stands due south on the meridian as the stars come out. Sirius is the bottom star of the big, equilateral Winter Triangle. The triangle’s other two stars are orange Betelgeuse to Sirius’s upper right (Orion’s shoulder) and Procyon to Sirius’s upper left. At this time of year, the Winter Triangle balances on its Sirius-point around nightfall.
■ New Moon (exact at 9:23 p.m. EDT).
THURSDAY, MARCH 19
■ A young-Moon challenge awaits you very low after sunset. This evening probably offers your best chance in a long while to set your lifetime record for the youngest, thinnest crescent Moon you have ever seen.
Venus helpfully guides the way. Starting 15 or 20 minutes after local sunset, use binoculars or a low-power, wide-field telescope to pick up Venus low almost due west. From there, move 6° or 7° to the lower right — just a little more than a typical binocular’s field of view — and try to make out the faint, hairline crescent. Only the middle part of its semicircular arc is likely to show at all.
If you manage to find the Moon with optical aid, then try with your unaided eyes.
For observers in the Eastern time zone the Moon will be only about 22 hours old. For the Central time zone, about 23 hours old; Mountain about 24; Pacific about 25. Compare the exact time of your sighting with the time of new Moon yesterday (see March 18 above) to determine the age of your crescent to the minute. Only a tiny fraction of humans have ever seen the Moon less than 24 hours old. This is definitely one for your lifetime observing journal.
This almost-level-cup arrangement happens in late winter and early spring every year (for our mid-northern latitudes). But this year, North America has the ideal timing for twilight moonwatchers looking to break the 24-hour-from-new barrier.
■ FRIDAY, MARCH 20
■ Spring begins in the Northern Hemisphere, fall in the Southern Hemisphere. Earth crosses the March equinox point in its orbit today at 10:46 a.m. EDT. At last.
■ Early this evening the Moon, still eerily thin, hangs about 8° above Venus low in the west in the fading twilight, as shown above.
SATURDAY, MARCH 21
■ As evening proceeds, Sirius shines brilliantly in the south-southwest. Lower left of it, by about one fist, is the triangle of Aludra, Wezen, and Adhara, from left to right. They form Canis Major’s tail, rear end, and hind foot, respectively. Or alternatively, the handle and the lower end of the Meat Cleaver.
Just left or upper left of the triangle, forming a 3rd- and 4th-magnitude arc that’s just a bit wider than the triangle is, are the three uppermost stars of the constellation Puppis, the p0op deck (stern) of the giant ancient constellation Argo Navis, the ship of Jason and the Argonauts.
These three are the only stars of Argo that are ever readily visible naked-eye from mid-northern latitudes.
Just 1.5° upper right of the middle of the three, binoculars on a dark night will show the little 6th-magnitude open cluster M93. It’s elongated northeast-southwest. See Matt Wedel’s Binocular Highlight column and chart in the March Sky & Telescope, page 43. He says that in his big 15x binoculars, the cluster “has a distinct cat’s-eye shape.”
SUNDAY, MARCH 22
■ After dark, spot the Pleiades about 5° upper left of the waxing crescent Moon.
■ On the Moon itself this evening, a small telescope or even binoculars show that only two of the gray lunar maria (“seas”) have yet come into this month’s sunlight: round Mare Crisium near the lunar limb, and Mare Fecunditatis, more irregular, farther in from the limb, and more centered in the crescent’s arc.
■ This is the time of year when Orion declines in the southwest through the evening, with his Belt roughly horizontal. But when will Orion’s Belt appear exactly horizontal? That depends mostly on your latitude, but also on where you’re located east-west in your time zone.
This Week’s Planet Roundup
Mercury and Mars remain hidden deep in the sunrise.
Venus, bright at magnitude –3.9, gleams low in twilight, a little less low each week. Look for it due west as twilight fades. Forty minutes after sunset it will still be almost a fist at arm’s length above horizontal. It sets near twilight’s end.
Jupiter is bright and easy, nearly overhead as you face south when the stars come out. Jupiter shines at magnitude –2.3, making it the brightest point in the night sky. It soon shifts to the very high southwest, then moves lower as the evening grows late. It sets around 2 or 3 a.m.
In a telescope Jupiter is 41 arcseconds wide. It’s shrinking and fading as Earth pulls farther ahead of it in our faster orbit around the Sun.
Even a small telescope can show, during good seeing, that the North Equatorial Belt is slightly darker and narrower than the South Equatorial Belt. Note the small dark red oval in the NEB’s north edge, at nearly the same longitude as a similar-sized white oval in the latitude of the South South Temperate Belt.
Saturn has sunk away into the sunset glow far lower right of Venus.
Uranus (magnitude 5.8 in Taurus, 4° SSW of the Pleiades) is still fairly high in the west these evenings. At high power in a telescope it’s a tiny but non-stellar dot, 3.5 arcseconds wide. You’ll need a detailed finder chart to identify it among similar-looking faint stars, such as the chart in last November’s Sky & Telescope, page 49.
Neptune is behind the glare of the Sun.
All descriptions that relate to your horizon — including the words up, down, right, and left — are written for the world’s mid-northern latitudes. Descriptions and graphics that also depend on longitude (mainly Moon positions) are for North America. Eastern Standard Time (EST) is Universal Time minus 5 hours. Eastern Daylight Time (EDT) is Universal Time minus 4 hours. UT is also known as UTC, GMT, or Z time.
Want to become a better astronomer? Learn your way around the constellations. They’re the key to locating everything fainter and deeper to hunt with binoculars or a telescope.
This is an outdoor nature hobby. For a more detailed constellation guide covering the whole evening sky, use the big monthly map in the center of each issue of Sky & Telescope, the essential magazine of astronomy.
For the attitude every amateur astronomer needs, read Jennifer Willis’s Modest Expectations Give Rise to Delight.
Once you get a telescope, to put it to good use you’ll want a much more detailed, large-scale sky atlas (set of charts). The basic standard is the Pocket Sky Atlas, in either the original or Jumbo Edition. Both show all 30,000 stars to magnitude 7.6, and 1,500 deep-sky targets — star clusters, nebulae, and galaxies — to search out among them.
Next up is the larger and deeper Sky Atlas 2000.0, plotting stars to magnitude 8.5; nearly three times as many, as well as many more deep-sky objects. It’s currently out of print, but maybe you can find one used.
The next up, once you know your way around well, are the even larger Interstellarum Deep-Sky Atlas (with 201,000+ stars to magnitude 9.5 and 14,000 deep-sky objects selected to be detectable by eye in very large amateur telescopes), and Uranometria 2000.0 (332,000 stars to mag 9.75, and 10,300 deep-sky objects).
Read How to Use a Star Chart with a Telescope. It applies just as much to electronic charts on your phone or tablet — which many observers find handier and more versatile, if sometimes less well designed and contextualized, than charts on paper.
You’ll also want a good deep-sky guidebook. A beloved old classic is the three-volume Burnham’s Celestial Handbook. It was my bedside reading for years. An impressive more modern one is the big Night Sky Observer’s Guide set (2+ volumes) by Kepple and Sanner. The pinnacle for total astro-geeks is the new Annals of the Deep Sky series, currently at 11 volumes as it works its way forward through the constellations alphabetically. So far it’s up to H.
Can computerized telescopes replace charts? Well, I used to say this:
“Not for beginners, I don’t think, unless you prefer spending your time getting finicky technology to work rather than learning how to explore through the sky yourself. As Terence Dickinson and Alan Dyer say in their Backyard Astronomer’s Guide, ‘A full appreciation of the universe cannot come without developing the skills to find things in the sky and understanding how the sky works. This knowledge comes only by spending time under the stars with star maps in hand and a curious mind.’ Without these, ‘the sky never becomes a friendly place.’ “
But, things change. The technology has continued to improve and become more user-friendly — particularly with software that can now recognize any star field to determine exactly where the telescope is pointed — finally bypassing all aiming imperfections in the mount, tripod, gears, bearings and other mechanics, or in the user’s skill in setting up.
The latest revolution is the rise of small, imaging-only “smartscopes.” These take advantage of not only today’s pointing technology, but also the vastly better capabilities of imaging chips and image processing compared to the human retina and visual cortex. The most sophisticated image stacking and processing can also come built right in. The result is decent deep-sky imaging from shockingly small, low-priced units. The image may be viewable on your phone or computer as it builds up in real time. Some can directly enable contributions to citizen-science projects.
Smartscopes are changing the hobby at the entry level. For more on this revolution see Richard Wright’s “The Rise of the Smart Telescopes” in the November 2025 Sky & Telescope. And read the magazine’s review of this especially small one.
If you get a larger, more conventional computerized scope that allows direct visual use, make sure that its drives can be disengaged so you can swing it around and point it readily by hand when you want to, rather than only slowly by the electric motors (which eat batteries).
Audio sky tour. Out under the evening sky with your
earbuds in place, listen to Kelly Beatty’s monthly
podcast tour of the naked-eye heavens above. It’s free.
“The dangers of not thinking clearly are much greater now than ever before. It’s not that there’s something new in our way of thinking, it’s that credulous and confused thinking can be much more lethal in ways it was never before.”
— Carl Sagan, 1996
“Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”
— John Adams, 1770
