Predawn moon near ruby Antares on March 27
4 comments Print Me Email to FriendTonight's Sky for Wednesday, Mar 26 2008
If you’re an early riser, look out a south-facing window on the morning of March 27 (Thursday) to see a lovely waning gibbous moon in front of the constellation Scorpius the Scorpion.
The reddish star near the moon is Antares, considered the Scorpion’s ruby Heart. Antares is a red supergiant star, located roughly opposite in the sky to another famous red supergiant star, Betelgeuse, in the constellation Orion the Hunter. Both Antares and Betelgeuse can clearly be seen as reddish stars, but not in the same sky. As a rule of thumb, when you see Antares in the sky, you won’t see Betelgeuse, because it will be below the horizon. Why? Simply because these two stars are located on opposite sides of Earth, and thus they never appear in our sky at the same time.
Both stars are interesting because they are near the end of their lifetimes and these massive supergiant red stars are expected to explode as a supernovae. The supernova could happen tomorrow, or millions of years in the future – astronomers don’t really know for sure. These stars are far enough from us (hundreds of light-years) that the deadly radiation probably won’t harm Earth.
I live in India mumbai. On the 7th of march at 1 am i saw a very bright star. Was this the ARCTURUS. Please help me out here.
Thanks.
Hi, Suneeta! You’ll need to give me a bit more information. It could have been Arcturus, but it could have been several other bright stars. I will need to know in which direction you were looking, and approximately how high in the sky the star was. You can say something like “I was looking to the southeast, and the star was halfway up in the sky.” Something like that. Then I can probably give you a good idea of which star it was.
Larry Sessions
Denver, Colorado USA
In an earlier post Suneeta stated see was looking out a western window.
Mumbai is locater 19:01:03.56N and 72:51:22.24E On March 7 @ 01:00 with a time zone of 5.5. Arcturus is to the East, Suggest Suneeta is viewing Cappella (13 Alpha Aurigae)
Note: I’m using the time zone of Bombay
Wave, Mal
LS
Certainly Capella would make more sense if looking generally west, but I didn’t see any comment about looking out a west window. But yes, if that is true then it is most like Capella. As Mal said, Arcturus was to the east at that time. Capella is bright yellowish, Arcturus is distinctly organish.
LS