Adrian Dening's Stars Over Somerset

Wednesday, 22 March 2023 17:00

Monday 27th March to Sunday 2nd April 2023

At the beginning of the week, the clocks will have just moved forward to British Summer Time or BST. This can cause confusion for amateur astronomers as most reports are quoted in a worldwide standard time format called UTC that stands for Universal Time Co-ordinated. It used to be called Greenwich Mean Time or GMT that we use during the winter months because the World's time zones are calculated from the Greenwich Observatory that happens to be in the time zone where we live! For the next six months, you have to remember to allow for the extra BST hour. To save confusion, I will always quote BST or our local time on Stars Over Somerset during the summer months so you can just look at your watch!

Last week I suggested trying to spot a thin Crescent Moon in the evening sky. Venture outside around 1 to 2 am local time in the early morning of Wednesday 28th and a 39%-lit Crescent Moon will be setting towards the west with planet Mars shining brightly a little above it.

If you prefer not being up quite so late, you could go outside around 10pm local time on Thursday 30th and Venus will be setting to the west, located below the Pleiades open cluster of stars. Just a bit down and to the left of Venus is a fun challenge if you've brought your telescope outside - planet Uranus shining at a magnitude of +5.8 where Venus is very bright at a magnitude of -3.9

Remember that the magnitude scale works back to front, so the brighter an object is in the night sky, then the more negative its number will be!

Time Zone map courtesy of Wikipedia
Screenshots courtesy of Stellarium
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