Young moon in front of Taurus tonight
Discuss Print Me Email to FriendTonight is Wednesday, Apr 09 2008
Look in the west tonight about an hour after sunset to see a waxing crescent moon in the middle of the constellation Taurus the Bull.
The moon is a great jumping-off spot to find your way around Taurus. The fairly bright light to the upper left of the moon is El Nath, this star depicting the tip of the Bull’s northern horn. (See tomorrow’s Tonight’s Sky.) To the lower right of the moon, pretty much on line with the moon and El Nath is the famed Pleiades star cluster – its six little starlets shaped like an itty-bitty dipper. (See yesterday’s sky chart.) Aldebaran glares to the moon’s lower left, this red giant star portraying the fiery eye of the bull.
Now back to the Pleiades. They are an open star cluster, made of hundreds of stars that were born out of the same vast cloud of gas and dust in space. The Pleiades stars are still moving together through the galaxy.
Aldebaran is a red giant. Our sun will be red giant in a few billion years. Unlike our sun, Aldebaran has a companion star so it is in a binary star system. And some astronomers in 1997 think they found a planet orbiting the bigger star of the stellar pair.
Don’t forget the lovely moon. Its color may redden as it sinks lower in the sky tonight. If you have binoculars, use them to cruise around the moon. Look near the middle of the crescent and just below that is where Apollo 11, where the first lunar module landed in the Sea of Tranquility. The famed footprints and equipment left by astronauts, however, aren’t visible even in big telescopes.
