Greetings, stargazers.
Today we can all say a fond farewell to Mountain Standard Time while we spend at least the next few months living in the Central Standard Time zone. Or at least that is what the clocks will report. I was just beginning to enjoy getting up and heading to work when the sun was over the horizon, but now I will have to wait a few more weeks for that to happen again. I don’t think I can say too often that we should just stick with standard time.
It would be hard to convince everyone to change to a single time zone, unless you happen to be in the one around Greenwich, England. Coordinated Universal Time is what used to go by Greenwich Mean Time. If you are in aviation, or the military, this is also known as Zulu time. Zulu is from the phonetic alphabet for the letter Z, which has been the designation for zero, or zero offset from UTC. When our clocks “spring forward,” we go from UTC-7 (seven hours behind UTC) to UTC-6.
Keeping track of the correct time makes a difference when reporting astronomical observations, such as the timing of exoplanet transits. One very annoying “feature” of the time change is when a smart camera or computer operating system tries to “help you” by automatically recording the time an image is captured. During a shift to or from daylight saving time this can possibly result in time gaps or overlapping time frames during an observing session.
Useful links
Lunar Eclipse
https://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/LEplot/LEplot2001/LE2025Mar14T.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_eclipse
Astronomy picture of the day
An Astronomer’s forecast for Durango
http://www.cleardarksky.com/c/DrngoCOkey.html?1
Old Fort Lewis Observatory
http://www.fortlewis.edu/observatory
hakes_c@fortlewis.edu
There are lots of things happening in the sky this month. The chain of planets across the evening sky is a nice marker for the zodiac. From what I saw on social media, it sounded like all the planets would scatter after the “best” night that was a couple of weeks ago. Except for Mercury, they just don’t move that fast against the background stars. Venus, Jupiter and Mars are the brightest ones out there, so hard to miss. Saturn is now setting too early to see, but entering the weekend Mercury was at its greatest eastern elongation (its farthest angle from the sun), so should be in an even better position to see than a couple of weeks ago. Mercury will be just below and to the left of Venus for the next few days.
Unless they are exceptionally close in the sky, planets can only be seen one-at-a-time through a telescope. Because it is still near opposition, or its closest approach to Earth, Mars is in a prime spot for viewing through a telescope. The next opposition will be in February 2027.
There is a total lunar eclipse this month on Thursday evening and into Friday morning. The first part of Earth’s umbral shadow will hit the moon about 11:09 p.m. (That’s Mountain daylight time) Totality will start at 12:25 and last a little longer than an hour. During totality, the moon will become red because it is only being illuminated by the ring of sunset light around the disk of the Earth. Because this is happening around midnight, the moon should be high enough in the sky to be visible everywhere there aren’t clouds. An observer on the moon would see a solar eclipse by the Earth. Perhaps one of the many new rovers on the moon will send some pictures of what it sees.
This is a slightly unusual month in that it has both a lunar and a solar eclipse. A partial solar eclipse will happen on March 29, but it won’t be visible from Durango.
Charles Hakes teaches in the physics and engineering department at Fort Lewis College and is the director of the Fort Lewis Observatory.
