Dark Sky News
April 2026
Upcoming meeting: Mar. 26 @7:30pm
Next Meeting: Apr. 30 @7:30pm
The parade of galaxies is on! We started with Leo last month. At about 9PM, look straight up to see a hot blue-white star known as Regulus. Start off your galaxy hunting with the famous Leo Triplet!
M65
M66
NGC 3628 (the Hamburger Galaxy)
Fun fact: The arc formed by connecting up Regulus, Jupiter, Spica and Aldebaran is right on the ecliptic!
Next up… Ursa Major! There are some beautiful galaxies in here:
M81/M82 (Bode’s Galaxy and the Cigar Galaxy)
M101 (Pinwheel Galaxy)
the beautiful galaxy/planetary pair: M108 and M97 (Owl Nebula)!
where no dummies have gone before…? lol
Four astronauts on a 10-day journey around the Moon and back to Earth!
Who names these anyway?
Click on the links to see the paths and times:
Earthshine occurs when sunlight reflects off the Earth’s surface and illuminates the unlit portion of the Moon’s surface, usually best seen a few days before or a few days after the New Moon. It is also sometimes called ashen glow, the old Moon in the new Moon’s arms, or the Da Vinci glow, after Leonardo da Vinci, who was the very first person to explain the phenomenon.
Since the light that generates earthshine is reflected twice – once off the Earth’s surface and then off the Moon’s surface, this light is much dimmer than the lit portion of the Moon.
It’s called planetshine when it occurs on other planets’ moons.
The Moon has an average albedo of 0.12, while the Earth’s average albedo is 0.3. This means that the Moon reflects about 12% of the sunlight that reaches it. The Earth on the other hand, reflects about 30% of all the sunlight that hit its surface. Because of this, the Earth, when seen from the Moon would look about a 100 times brighter than a full Moon that is seen from the Earth.
The Lyrids are one of the oldest recorded meteor showers—according to some historical Chinese texts, the shower was seen over 2,500 years ago. The fireballs in the meteor shower are created by debris from comet Thatcher, which takes about 415 years to orbit around the Sun. The comet is expected to be visible from Earth again in 2276.