 Welcome to the skies of a long month for April 2020. I'm staff astronomer John Innsworth for Longmont Public Media. Let's begin with the news. If you saw last month we are greatly concerned about the fate of the star Beetlejuice, but we have an important update. If you did miss last month this is a bright star in the constellation of Orion, about 650 light-years away, about 10 times the mass of our Sun. Its age is about eight to nine million years old with a lot expected lifetime of about nine million years, so we know that it is close to its end. Beetlejuice is in the upper left corner of the constellation Orion. We're going to talk about Orion a lot this month, but we have the four stars around the corner here. This is the shoulder of the hunter built right here. Pictures from 2019 generated December showed what probably was dust obscuring the star, making it get dimmer and dimmer. Infrared observations we looked at last month also showed large amounts of gas and dust heated by the star around the star itself. That's the actual size of the star instead of the black circle. It went from the 10th brightest star to the 23rd brightest star by late December 2019. It hit its record minimum brightness of a positive 1.614 magnitude in the week February 17 to 22nd. That is the faintest we've seen in the last hundred years, and we know that it's going to supernova sometime in the next hundred thousand years, and some people were hoping maybe myself included that that would happen about now. What seems to be occurring is there are two cycles of dimming that usually are out of phase with each other and they lined up this time to make this super deep minimum. Since middle February the star has been brightening again at a nice smooth curve. It's up to about 87% of its usual brightness in the last couple days of March. The dust is clearing around Beelzer's. Saturn is the king of the moon, well, the moon population is not moon people. The Carnegie Institute for Science led a team of Scott Shepard in charge, searching very closely for new moons, and they discovered them. A larger moon collided in the past and broken apart. But they discovered 20 new moons, 17 belonging to one group orbiting one way and the rest in a different orbit. That brings the Saturn moon count to 82 moons surpassing Jupiter's 79. Taking a look at these new moon orbits, these are all going around in the red, in a clockwise fashion. The green one's actually going backwards in a counterclockwise fashion. And these other blue ones are sort of the right angle-ish to those other new moons. We have a comet coming in. This could be a really good one. Comet Atlas C 2019 Y4 is calculated to have about a 4,000 year period. So if you don't see it this time, it's going to be a while before it comes back. It will get only a quarter of an astronomical unit from the Sun. One astronomical unit is the average distance between the Sun and the Earth. So it's going to be really close, closer than Mercury. I see its orbit. In the picture here, it's coming down from above, from what we call North, to eventually go below the plane and the solar system before it goes back up. We think it's part of our parent comet that broke up maybe about 5,000 years ago, and another component of that original comet seems to be the great comet of 1845. That one had a 10 degree long tail shown at second magnitude. In a future month, we'll talk about what the magnitudes are. The smaller a magnitude is, or the more negative a magnitude is, the brighter it is. So the Sun is at like negative 27, the full moon may be negative 14. The dimmest thing you can see up in Rocky Mountain National Park with the naked eye may be about positive 6 or positive 7. So a second magnitude is pretty bright. It might be pretty easy to see. Atlas, by some models, has the potential of getting to be negative 5 magnitudes. That would make it brighter than Venus. Venus we'll talk about is the very bright object in the southwestern sky in the evenings this month and last. It'll continue to get brighter through April, all the way to its peak at the very end of May. So we'll have an update on this next month. Its orbit, taking it through the constellation of Versa Major on the end of March and into April, it's passing through Camelopartilus and heading sort of the southerly direction in the sky. We do have news on big star parties. There are almost a constant stream of star parties coming up around the world each year. But due to their current news events, the April star parties have all been canceled. South Stargaze in Mississippi, Southern Star 2020, North Carolina, and the Michigan Star Party near Vangilia, Michigan, if I said that correctly, are canceled. But things coming up in May and June are still on. For instance, the Texas Star Party in Fort Davis, the bootleg Spring Star Party in Illinois and the Grand Canyon Star Party in Arizona in June. You can see a list of star parties, future, past, canceled, and running at skyintelscult.org. Look at their news segment. You'll see the 2020 Star Parties Update page. The news segment this month will be Astro 101. We'll talk about magnitudes next month in this segment. For this month, we're going to talk about how you measure your way around the sky. The sky has 360 degrees around it, any circle does. But we talk about the separation between objects or the height of objects off the horizon by a subset of that, a certain specific number of degrees separating things. And you don't want to get out some expensive pieces of equipment, like a succident, to measure these angles. You can do it with your hands. That is a pretty bad pun, a handy way to measure the sky. So, a pinky finger at arm's length. Again, you're putting your arm all the way out and closing one eye and sighting down your arm to look at the distance that is spanned in the sky by your finger, pinky finger in this case. And that gives you the smallest unit, one degree. Believe it or not, the full moon is only about a half a degree. So you can get two full moons across that distance. Now, you may object that, well, some people are taller, some people are shorter. Does this work for everyone? Well, your arm is proportional and your finger is proportional to your height. So it all works out close enough. Three fingers at arm's length, five degrees. You can make a fist with your thumb tucked in and that span from the pinky side of the thumb side is 10 degrees. Put your pinky and index finger out kind of in a relaxed fashion. You get about 15 degrees. 15 degrees is an important measurement because that's how far the celestial equator with the sky moves from east to west in an hour. So that's one hour of motion in the sky. If you want to go even further, maybe 25 degrees, stick your pinky finger out and your thumb out for that greater measurement. If you're a piano player, you might even be used to getting a little wider separation. If you don't really stretch your thumb out far, you may be closer to 20 degrees. That one's a little sloppy. So let's take a look at the sky above your backyard this month. We have the moon first quarter on April 1st. So just as this video is dropping, full moon occurs seven days later. April 8th, last quarter when it's only visible in the morning sky. April 15th, former tax day. And then April 23rd will be the new moon this month. Looking at the planets, things have not changed very much from March in the dusk in the evening. Venus is still that super bright object. Just incredibly easy to see. You can see it out the car window if you're just casually looking. You don't have to do anything special to spot Venus. It is a star-like object. It looks like an airplane headlight coming in at you. It'll start almost 43 degrees above the horizon at the beginning of the month. That's four fists and then three pinky fingers up to 36 degrees by the end of the month. So it is starting to be overtaken by the sun as the sun moves through the background stars to the east. So it will be getting lower, but right now it's coming off of one of its best heights above the horizon and away from the sun that we've seen in many years, like I covered last month. And it's now going to be sinking, eventually to vanish in the glare of the sun in a few months from now. Near Venus is Uranus. This needs binoculars or a small telescope to be glimpsed. It's in the constellation of Aries in early April. And then vanishes behind the sun at the end of the month. If you look at the sky in the southwest, right after sunset, there's the sun going down behind the mountains. For reference, here's our constellation Orion with three stars in row for the belt and people juice up on top. Our object last month was the Pleiades, this little star cluster in Taurus. And there's Venus right next to the Pleiades at the beginning of the month. And here is Uranus down here in the constellation Aries, sort of a comma-shaped constellation right here. This green line is the path in the sun moving in the planets called the ecliptic. And Uranus and Venus are both very close to that line. This red line is the equator in the sky. That is directly above the Earth's equator. Going to midnight, looking either side of midnight, we don't have any planets up still. That will change as all the planets we're about to talk about move through the sky as the sun heads eastward, leaving them up all night long. A great time to have some backyard viewing with binoculars or telescope, but not yet. Let's go to that morning's sky. We're going out as just the first glow starts to show up. And we have Jupiter, Mars, and Saturn still putting on a show. From east to west or left to right, there will be Mars, Saturn, and Jupiter. Neptune is really close to the sun until the end of the month when it emerges. And Pluto is very close to Mars in the morning sky. Taking a look at the same view, here's our Earth's equator painted up in the sky. And this green line is the ecliptic, the path with sun moving in the planets. And it is busy here, we've got a little comment over here, but we're not talking about that. Jupiter is there, Pluto is right next to that, Mars right there, Saturn is right there. We have a large asteroid series down here, and Mercury and Neptune are very close to the sun, as it's just starting to rise over here. Lots of things going on in the morning sky. We do have a special event with these planets, April 14th to 16th. The moon will come sailing right through them. It's kind of spicing up what's already a really interesting pattern. So on the 14th the moon will be Neptune-Jupiter, 15th it will be just below Saturn, on the 16th it will have past Mars in the early morning sky. Looking at the sun for April and how long our days are getting. For the first day of April the sun rises at 6.43 a.m. The sun sets 7.25 p.m. and the length of the day is 12 hours, 42 minutes. Well close to noon, when the sun is on the meridian, that's the imaginary line that cuts the sky eastern and western part of the sky in half. It's the highest point the sun gets in the day is when it's on the meridian. It'll be 55 degrees up, so five fist heights and three fingers up. By the end of the month, 30th the sun rises at 6 a.m. Sun sets almost 8 o'clock at night, 7.55 p.m. The length of the day has jumped very noticeably to 13 hours, 54 minutes. So we've gained an hour and 12 minutes if I just did the math correctly. And the sun is 10 degrees higher at that meridian near noon time position. Easter comes Sunday, April 12th, and this holiday moves around on the calendar because it is defined astronomically. It's the first Sunday after the Paschal Moon or the Full Moon, which is the first Full Moon after the beginning of spring or after the vernal Inquinox we talked about last month. That occurred on March 19th, but by the church it is defined as March 21st. The Inquinox can occur on March 19th, 20th, or 21st astronomically. So with that definition of the 21st being always considered the Inquinox as far as the church is concerned, the earliest possible date for Easter is March 22nd, the latest possible date is April 25th. Let's take a look at our feature object. Last month it was the Pleiades. This month we're going to look at the Orion Nebula or the Great Orion Nebula. Now if you've gone to the Southern Hemisphere there are some amazing star clusters in Nebula down there that kind of quit the Great Orion Nebula to shame, but we're going to keep it great up here in the Northern Hemisphere because it really is one of the best. It's under the belt of Orion. It's about 1,344 light years away. That central bright area is about 20 light years across. This is a Hubble Space Telescope image on the right, but you're more likely to see in a medium size or smaller telescope in your backyard would be more like this little image in the bottom. Get a little bit of color. You can see a little bit of the shadowing of the gas and dust. This is a birthplace of stars. Stars are coming together and forming new ones. And to our big map there's a back row of Orion. There's B-loose on top. There's three stars in the row. Right below there's a little dagger hanging off the belt. There's one, two, three little bright objects. The center one is a little fuzzy even to the naked eye. So just go out in a darkish night, maybe with no moon in this part of the sky. You'll see that little fuzzy patch with your eye. That is the Great Orion Nebula. It actually is in telescopes. It is a tree. You're a long man observing charge this month just to find the Milky Way itself. After sunset it's pretty close to rising up out of the south going high overhead into the northern sky. The summer Milky Way is much brighter because when you're out in the middle of summer looking south the center of the galaxy is down in this location. So you're looking out sort of sideways and then up and overhead you're looking opposite of the center of the galaxy up into space. And this part of the galaxy is thinner, not as bright and it is harder to detect. But going from near serious, brightest star in the nighttime sky up past Orion to the right of this constellation of Gemini through bright stars, Caster and Pollock to mark the head of the twins you should be able to see a segment of the Milky Way if you get up towards the outskirts of town maybe north of 66 or east of Cayman Ward 1 or out beyond the airport road you can catch the Milky Way. The astronomy events near Longmont for this month sadly they are few and far between normally April 18th would have been the Boulder County Parks and Open Space Star Party with the Longmont Astronomical Society but that's been canceled this month. Little Thompson Observatory at starkids.org and angelsabove.org Estes Park Memorial Observatory Public Knights are canceled for now they're both located on school grounds so while these schools are closed they need to be closed. But Northern Colorado Astronomical Society they had to move last month's speaker Carla Johns talking about Chile land of big skies, big scopes and big data to April 2nd and they're going to do it via webcast didn't see this on their site but it looks like they certainly have the ability to stream this later. So I took a look at nocoastro.org and see if they have an archive of this if you happen to miss the meeting live. This has been the skies over Longmont for April 2020 I'm Staff Astronomer John Insworth Thank you for watching and keep looking up.