[energetic music]
[Narrator] What's Up for March?
Venus climbs high while Jupiter dives sunward,
and the little planet that shares its namesake
with your breakfast cereal.
Venus and Jupiter begin the month very close together
in the evening sky,
following their close conjunction on March 1st.
They quickly go their separate ways though.
Venus climbs higher in the sky each night
for the next couple of months,
while Jupiter dives after the Sun.
The giant planet appears lower in the sky each night
through the month, making its exit as an evening object.
It'll reappear in May in the pre-dawn sky with Saturn.
On the 23rd and 24th, in the couple of hours
after sunset., you'll find the Moon
as a beautifully slim crescent hanging just below,
and the next night above, blazing bright Venus.
Then on the 25th, the Moon continues
upward in the sky, landing right next to the brilliant Pleiades
star cluster that night.
With March bringing the arrival of spring
in the Northern Hemisphere
and fall in the Southern Hemisphere,
it's a time for both planting
or harvesting crops, depending on where you live.
So it's perhaps a fitting time to try and spot the planet named
for a mythical goddess
of agriculture, grains and fertile lands.
(In addition to being the origin of the word cereal.)
That's dwarf planet Ceres
this month, it's an opposition, meaning it's directly
on the opposite side of Earth from the Sun.
This is when a planet is around its shortest distance
from Earth, making this the best time
to have a go at observing it when it's at its brightest.
Ceres is the largest object
in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
Still, it's only about 600 miles wide, far smaller
than our own Moon.
Its dusty surface is peppered with impact craters, with bright
salt deposits here and there that hint at the possibility
of slushy, briny ice beneath its surface.
In fact, NASA's Dawn spacecraft found that Ceres
could be up to one-quarter water ice on the inside.
Now, Ceres is too faint to see with the unaided eye,
so to locate it in the March sky,
you'll need binoculars or a small telescope.
Find the lion constellation Leo
in the southeast after around 9 p.m..
The bright, bluish-white star Regulus.
The lion's heart should catch your eye first.
Then look eastward about 25 degrees to find Denebola
which represents the lion's tail.
From there Ceres should be about eight
or nine degrees farther east from Denebola.
It appears as a faint star-like point of light,
which is why when Ceres and objects
like it were first discovered in the early 19th century,
they were called “asteroids,” which means “star-like.”
Since 2006, Ceres has been classified as a dwarf planet,
along with other diminutive
worlds in our solar system, including Pluto, Eris.
Haumea, and Makemake.
Wherever you land on the topic of “planet versus
dwarf planet”-status for worlds like Ceres and Pluto,
what's really important to remember
is that the way we think about different families of objects
in our solar system has evolved over time and likely will
continue to evolve as we explore and learn more about them.
So here's hoping you try your hand at spotting Ceres
as you explore the skies above your home planet this month.
Here are the
phases of the Moon for March.
Stay up to date with all of NASA's missions
to explore the solar system and beyond at NASA.gov.
I'm Preston Dyches from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
and that's What's Up for this month.