 Welcome to the skies over Colorado for March 2021. I am Steph astronomer John Ensworth for Longmont Public Media. Astronomy News this month. How can you do anything else but talk about the perseverance and its landing on Mars just a few days ago. Perseverance is the name of the rover that in this bottom picture is located here. There are many orbiting Mars satellites that we have sent and this one picked up the descent stage the parachute and the heat shield is shown here. The picture up on the top is the first picture taken and sent back after touchdown. This is also known as the Mars 2020 rover. Built at JPL the launch date was the 30th of July 2020 and it made it to Mars on the 18th of February. It landed in Cesaro crater. This following the methodology of an earlier rover curiosity slowed down using a parachute and a sky crane and what they call the seven minutes of terror where you don't know what's gonna happen and it's completely on its own making decisions on conditions and things that are changing but everything went right. The design team did put a secret message in the parachute and it didn't take long for the internet to decode it. It translates to dare mighty things which is a quote from President Theodore Roosevelt and an unofficial motto of JPL it's found on many of the walls around the buildings. This is also going to feature a first a Mars helicopter called Ingenuity. It's a four-power solar powered helicopter and they hope to get about 30 days of experimental flights but they have yet to see if it will survive its first cold night. Here's a panoramic picture taken by the rover. It's still growing through check-through phases. It hasn't moved much. It's the first color image. It looks familiar except for the complete lack of grass. It's one of its wheels or close up of the pitted rocks in the soil. Here's the picture from the sky crane down on the rover just seconds before it touched down. It has four scientific objectives. It is actually looking for microbial life to see if the past environments are capable of supporting life. Seeking biosignatures to see if the past microbial life particularly in rock types might be preserved and it's going to collect core rock and regolith or soil samples. It's really soil on earth where you have no life material mixed in. It's regolith and they'll be storing that for a future mission that hasn't even been launched that will come and get the collection and bring it back to earth for a close study and it's going to test the feasibility of producing oxygen from sunlight just breaking apart the carbon dioxide of the atmosphere itself. Also this month and not featured in another part of our presentation this month the minor planet Vesta is at opposition which means it's straight out from earth which is overhead at midnight. The best night the night of exact opposition is March 4th so just about when this video comes out but it will be still approximately in this location and still very bright for a few days on either side. Easy to see in binoculars and because it's 5.8 magnitude in Leo you can technically see it with a naked eye. So here's some about that some of the stars in Leo and it's moving along pretty quickly among the background stars. Cygnus X1 is the first powerful x-ray source that we detected when we started looking for other high-frequency signals from the universe and we quickly figured out that it is a best-fit model for a black hole so it's also the first black hole candidate that humanity has discovered. New measurements place it further away from us meaning we think it's heavier than we once expected. This discovery was made in 1964 as a powerful x-ray source but this powerful x-ray source had no visible component but a companion star did wobble and the estimation at the time was it's about 6,000 light years away putting the black hole at about 15 solar masses. Refinements and the measurements made just recently move that another thousand light years further out to 7,000 light years meaning it's got a way more to be doing what it's doing so that bumps it up to 21 solar masses and the companion star is at 40 solar masses. The star that became the black hole probably was about twice it's the black hole size there's a tremendous amount of loss before and during the black hole production. I've brought the big star party section back hoping to see some good star parties and it's pretty hard to find anything definitive. No one's really putting any listings out but you can look at ones that used to be in March so Spring Mountain Ranch was last year on March 14th. I could not find any new information on that. There's also the Mésier challenge or the Mésier marathon is best in March and April and many clubs will conduct outings to look for as many Mésier objects as you can without computer systems through the night. You can almost give them all in the spring. Death Valley Dark Sky Festival normally happens at this time as well and I could not find any new information on that. The Cathedral Gorge Spring Fling would have been scheduled April 24, 25, 2021 and that has been, I was cancelled in 2020 and there's no new news but we'll keep an eye on that April's next month. I included some links here to places you can go check yourself to see if any of these star parties come on. Your Astral 101 lesson for this year it's the Vernal Inquinox. This is sort of a timing item but the Sun is on the equator. It's been below the equator throughout winter. The first day of spring is defined as the day that it crosses the equator and goes into the northern hemisphere so this is a northern hemisphere of spring, southern hemisphere, autumn. It is the day before and it is really close to the equator and on the ecliptic and on the meridian at local noon. So take a look at the Earth's tilt as we go around the center. Tilt stays fixed in space pointing very close to the north of Star Polaris. The summer, the first day of summer around June 22nd. The Sun is more directly overhead in the northern hemisphere. Six months later, around December 22nd gets messed up a little bit by the leap year and the fractional day that we have to correct for. The Sun is more directly overhead in the southern hemisphere giving them summer and the northern hemisphere winter. But on March 21st, give or take a day, the Vernal Inquinox has this axis of the north and south pole exactly perpendicular to the Sun. So the entire Earth gets sunlight from pole to pole and pretty close to a 12-hour day, 12-hour night. There is a myth that on this day you can balance eggs on their bottoms, but I've been able to do it every day of the year. So this guy above your backyard for March 2021, the moon is at last quarter at the beginning of the month, middle of the month, new moon, later in the month, first quarter and we are still having full moon occur very close to the end of the month. Remember we had full moon on October 31st Halloween and things have not changed significantly since. But we don't have very many planets in the evening sky that is. In dusk and evening the planet Mars is fairly high in the southwestern sky. It sets a little bit before midnight, so at least half the night you've got one planet down there. If you get your binoculars or small telescope out, you have Uranus. It sets mid-evening, it's closer to the sun from our point of view, so it's lower in the southwestern sky. But that's all for the evening sky. Here's Mars up here at about 6.50 p.m. There is Uranus down here. On this particular night the moon is just coming from this thingy, the sun, and beginning to get a larger slice of light on the sunward side. In middle of the night Mars is still low in the southwestern sky, but there really isn't anything else in the sky. That's it. We've got some items in the Kuiper bell listed on the program here, but nothing to see. In the morning sky Venus is too close to the sun now to be seen, same for Neptune. Jupiter and Saturn are getting further and further from the sun, higher and the sky and rising earlier and earlier into the morning sky. So they're coming back around for another pass to the night. Mercury is also emerging from the glow of the sun. Taking a look at the sunrise here, mid-month. We have Venus and Neptune way down here. There's Mercury, Jupiter, and Saturn. Pluto's up there too, but I've not even seen that in my own telescope. Daylight savings ends Sunday, March 14th. So there's a shift in our times here. We begin the month with a sunrise at 6.30 sunset just before 6 p.m. And because of the shift in daylight savings, we end the month with a sunrise at 6.45 almost the same, but a sunset at 7.23, almost 7.30 p.m. So very noticeable change, but it's an artificial shift in time. What really matters is looking at the length of the day. We go from 11 hours and 19 minutes with the sun 43 degrees up to a day length of 12 hours and a half or a touch more and an altitude of 55 degrees. This is the month that we gain the greatest amount of daylight within the month. Things are changing fast now. If you take a look at the weather side of my videos, you'll see that the normal high and low temperatures are beginning to rise very rapidly as well. Our feature object is the only planet that isn't a minor planet that we haven't hit yet. That is Mercury, which is visible low in the morning sky. If you're driving east before sunrise, you might see this especially later in the month. It is the innermost planet. It has an 88 Earth Day long year. Its day, its rotation on its own axis, takes 116 Earth Days. That's a three to two residence, three years to two days. And that is because of the tidal effects of the sun on the planet. And the fact that the planet isn't perfectly uniform throughout internally and in shape. It is small, 38% of Earth's diameter. Coincidentally, gravity is 38% of Earth's. It is almost north-south pointing with a two-degree tilt of its axis. And it only gets 28 degrees from the sun in ideal conditions. We talked about inferior and superior planets in an earlier video. It has no real atmosphere. Your Colorado Observing Challenge really is a challenge this month. Every six years or so, things line up in the solar system. So the plane of the moons going around Jupiter line up perfectly with Earth. That means there's a chance that we see the moons occult each other. And one of those occultations occurs March 17th, where Io sits right in front of Europa. And I've got a big zoom in here. This is not how it would look in a telescope. This is a software-generated simulation. And then almost a month later, we have a total eclipse in which Ganymede Eclipse is Europa, casting a shadow on it. So kind of neat things to look for if you have a telescope. That's trying to me that it's near Longmont this month. Things aren't quite opening yet. But we do have more folks trying to zoom and zoom like meetings. March 18th, Longmont Astronomical Society will feature all these worlds. The Exoplanet Revolution by Dan Dura from the Southwest Research Institute at 7 p.m. They normally would have, I believe, if I'm finding their schedule correctly. They aren't even listing it anymore. They're Open Space Star Party March 18th and that's canceled for now. Little Thompson Observatory Public Night would be the third Friday of the month. But we've decided to remain closed through June 2021. If you go to the website StarKids.org, you can try to get a personal Star Party via Zoom. You just have to schedule that. There are not many slots open for those. We did have our Zoom meeting on that third, it was actually a YouTube stream on the third Friday in February and it went well. I was speaking on axions and you can go to the special events tab and see that talk. That's the Spark Memorial Observatory has on their site. They're close to the end of February. I'm guessing that they will be extended to March and beyond. Northern Colorado Astronomical Society March 4th, just about when this video comes out, we'll be having 615 webinar speaker Michael Carroll Ice Worlds of the Solar System, nocoastro.org. This is Fisk Bontarian being in the spring semester now. We'll be having live events. This will be March 11th at 7 p.m. The craziest creatures on earth, what the world's wackiest organisms can tell you about life in the cosmos. coloraw.edu.fisk and they are doing YouTube channel live shows from the Observatory February 3rd April 28th. Check that out at coloraw.edu.sbo and finally this month my desktop software suggestion is the powerhouse program the Sky X. This is used by an awful lot of the world's private observatories, backyard observatories all the way up to the biggest observatories on the earth. It is high performance, high precision, amazing software. It's sort of the Adobe version of astronomical software. It's got features upon features. You can be learning things about it for years to come. That's a screenshot of a typical main page. You can of course put as much detail in here as you want, draw in constellations, name things, turn on comets, whatever you wish. From their website they say Sky X Professional Additional Astronomy Software is an essential tool for observatory control, deep space imaging and scientific discovery. It includes the browse range of advanced features to enhance your experience under the night skies and I would believe that. The cost is pretty high though. The low end seeker has a $10 a year fee, $80 sign-on fee, student additions $15 a year, $65 initial, serious astronomer $30 a year with $115 sign-on and the Sky X Professional with all the bells and whistles is $100 a year with a $500 sign-on. If I can take a look at bisque.com, read the features, see what software level might be good for you. And again, these are not paid commercials at all. These are just the things that I like to use. I will bring up free stuff just as much as the paid. So if you have additions and corrections, please contact me, Jonathan'sworth at gmail.com. This has been the skies over Colorado for March 2021. Keep looking up.