Spring is officially upon us and the Ohio weather is reflecting that perfectly. This week will be relatively cloudy (with some rain storms) with nighttime temperature hardly getting below the upper 30s. The weekend may have some gaps in the clouds for some stargazing, or perhaps briefly Wednesday night after the rain. Sunset this week is right around 7:45 PM. Ever since daylight saving pushed us forward an hour, sunset and darkness consequently fall an hour later. If there are some clear skies ahead this week, be on the lookout for a newly discovered nova that can be spotted with a small telescope, the brightening moon, an early-morning Jupiter, and rising Messier 51.

Very recently, on March 18, Yuji Nakamura discovered a brand new nova within our galaxy designated V1405 Cas. A nova occurs when a white dwarf star is orbiting a larger main sequence star (like our sun) and the white dwarf’s gravity slowly siphons off hydrogen from the larger star. At some point in this process the surface of the white dwarf begins to heat up and nuclear fusion begins at the surface. This surface based fusion causes the white dwarf to glow very bright. So without warning on March 18, this nova appeared as a brand new star in the night sky. This new nova shines at magnitude 9.6 and can be spotted with small telescopes in darker locations. V1405 Cas can be found in the Cassiopeia region on the sky and sits very near the Bubble nebula (a fun deep-sky object for astrophotographers).

How to find V1405 CAS near the “w” of Cassiopeia low in the northwest skies just after sunset.

A Telescopic photograph of the Nova V1405 CAS. It is visible in good binoculars or a small scope, but to spot it will require comparing your view to a good map of the sky.

The night sky this week will be dominated by the moon’s light. It will reach full moon this Sunday as it sweeps more and more eastwards in the sky night-to-night. For people who have not gotten the chance to look through binoculars or a telescope into space, it seems the moon is always most amazing. Even to more veteran stargazers, we see the moon so often but with our wide-field and imperfect eyes. Getting up close to the lunar surface with binoculars/telescopes and seeing the craters and old lava seas is always amazing.

If you wake up early for work (between 6 and 7:15 AM), step outside and look low on the ESE horizon to see Jupiter, which will stand out against the brightening sky. It does make a quick and easy binocular object since it is so big and bright. If you had a radio telescope you would notice that Jupiter is the second brightest radio object in the sky (day and night) second to only the sun. This is because one of Jupiter’s moons, Io, releases lots of charges particles into space that get swept up in the red giant’s strong magnetic field. This interaction between the charged particles and magnetic field releases something called cyclotron radiation and synchrotron radiation – but mostly cyclotron which is found in radio frequencies.

In the spirit of galaxy season, a great galaxy to look for this spring is Messier object 51 (M51) that has the nickname, the Whirlpool Galaxy. Similar to the M101 galaxy (mentioned a few weeks back), M51 is also a face-on spiral. So from earth we can see all of the grand spiral arms that give a galaxy its textbook look. M51 shines at magnitude 8.10 but it is very small in the sky, so you may need a more powerful telescope or a camera attached to a telescope to really make out the details of the galaxy’s structure. It can be found by looking just 4° south of the last star in the Big Dipper’s handle.

The beautiful spiral M51 is a favorite of skilled astrophotographers.

This week is a typical springtime Ohio week – cloudy and rainy but with warmer weather day and night. As the sun sets later and later, the total number of hours of darkness will continue to decrease up until the summer solstice. So be sure to maximize your time outside during the shorter and warmer nights. This week be on the lookout for the new nova near Cassiopeia, the full moon, Jupiter low on the morning horizon, and the M51 spiral galaxy.

Clear Skies!

Jared May: What's Up March 23 - March 30