Skywatch for the week of April 6, 2020

Tue Apr 7, 2020 NAME THAT MOON The moons of our solar system have many shared features, such as meteor impact craters, mountains, plains and valleys. See if you can identify the moon if I list some of those named features. This first moon has impact craters named Plato, Kepler, Copernicus, Galileo, Aristotle and Hevelius, plus great dark features like the Sea of Cold, the Bay of Rainbows, the Ocean of Storms and the Sea of Tranquility. This is easy, it’s the moon, our moon. What about El Dorado, Aztlan, Xanadu and Shangri-La? These features are found on Saturn’s largest moon, Titan. This next moon has lots of volcanoes with names like Thor and Loki, Marduk, Maui and Pele. The moon is Io and it orbits Jupiter. And finally, try Kirk, Spock, Uhura, the plains of Vulcan, Nemo, Skywalker, Ripley, Vader crater, the Tardis chasm, and a dark feature at its north pole named Mordor? These are found on Pluto’s largest moon, Charon.

Wed Apr 8, 2020 APRIL’S FULL MOON The moon is full tonight. This is the first full moon since the beginning of Spring, so it’s called the Paschal moon, which determines when Passover and Easter occur each year. Easter, which occurs just a few days from now, is always observed on the Sunday following the first full moon of the spring season; it’s what folks used to call, a “moveable feast,” because the date of the observance changes from year to year. Since spring is underway, the Sioux Indians call April’s full moon, the Moon of Greening Grass; to the Winnebago, it is Planting Corn Moon. The Mohawk knew it as “Onerahtokha,” the budding time, which is similar to the Kiowa’s Leaf Moon, as this is the time of year when new leaves form on trees. The Cheyenne Indians speak of it as the Moon When the Geese Lay Eggs. And to the Cherokee it is “kawohni,” the flower moon.

Thu Apr 9, 2020 THE BIG DIPPER AS A GUIDE The Big Dipper is well-placed in the northeast sky after sunset, and it’s a helpful guide to other stars. If you draw a line through the two stars in the front of the Big Dipper's bowl and extend that line to the north, it will point to the North Star, Polaris, which is not really a very bright star at all, but it is always in the north, because the earth’s North Pole points toward that star. Polaris is also at the end of the handle of the Little Dipper, which is also hard to see since most its stars are even dimmer than Polaris. So go back to the Big Dipper’s pointer stars and run a line in the other direction, and you’ll discover a group of stars that looks like a backwards question mark high up in the eastern sky - that’s Leo the Lion. Finally, draw a line through the three stars in the Big Dipper’s handle, and then fly off the handle, and low in the east are the stars Arcturus and Spica.

Fri Apr 10, 2020 YURI GAGARIN On April 12th, 1961, the first human was launched into space. What was his name? It wasn’t John Glenn, he was the first American to orbit the earth in a Mercury spacecraft. It wasn’t Neil Armstrong, he and Buzz Aldrin were the first astronauts to land on the moon, back in 1969. It wasn’t Alan Shepard. He also walked on the moon, and he was the first American to go into outer space, but that happened almost a month after the first man orbited the earth. That man was Yuri Gagarin, a Soviet cosmonaut. It was a smooth launch and a smooth orbit, but the way Gagarin came back to earth was a bit unorthodox. The Vostok spacecraft didn’t have enough parachutes to slow it down without leaving a small crater, so several miles up, Gagarin was ejected from the capsule, and then had to parachute down to the ground all on his own – those were exciting times!