Stargazing is always a lot of fun year-round, but if there’s a slow time of year, this is it. The spring constellations just don’t have the razzmatazz that the winter ones do. That’s easy to prove. As soon as it’s dark enough, and that’s not until about 9:30 or so these nights, you’ll see what’s left of the great winter shiners in the southwestern sky. The great constellation Orion the Hunter is about halfway below the horizon, but the bright winter stars of Gemini the Twins, Auriga the Charioteer, and Canis Minor are still hanging high above the horizon, saying their long goodbye from our evening sky over the next month or so. Jupiter, the brightest star-like object in the entire sky, is also dazzling in the west but it doesn’t really count because it’s not always among those constellations.
There are only three bright stars in the eastern half of the sky these last spring evenings; Arcturus in the constellation Bootes the Hunting Farmer, Spica in the faint constellation Virgo the Virgin, and Vega in Lyra the Harp. All of the other stars in the eastern heavens are definitely a little ho hum.
The spring constellation Coma Berenices, or Berenice’s Hair, is definitely a ho-hummer when it comes to brightness, but if you can see it in the dark skies of the countryside you’ll come to appreciate its true beauty. It actually resembles flowing hair, and the story about how it wound up in the heavens is based on a true story. No other constellation can really claim that.
To find Coma Berenices in the dark rural skies, face east as darkness sets in. Look for the brightest star you can see. That will be Arcturus, about halfway from the horizon to the overhead zenith. The flowing celestial hair will be about 25 degrees above Arcturus, which is about 2½ fist-widths held at arm’s length. The darker the sky the lovelier the locks of heavenly hair will be. Coma Berenices is actually more of an open star cluster than a constellation. Open star clusters are populated by young stars, at least by astronomical standards. They’re all gravitationally born together out of the same gigantic cloud of tenuous hydrogen gas. The stars of Coma Berenices are about 500 million years old on average. They also lie relatively close to us in our part of the Milky Way Galaxy, right around 250 light-years away. That’s not exactly a hop, skip, and jump, as just one light year is the equivalent of a little under 6 trillion miles.
One of the biggest astronomical events of the year is coming up Monday morning. The tiny planet Mercury, not all that much larger than our moon, will attempt to eclipse our sun but will fail miserably. Against the face of the sun from our perch on Earth all it will look like is a tiny little dot only covering about .007th of the sun’s disk at any one time. Nice try, Mercury.
In all seriousness, this is called a transit of Mercury and it doesn’t happen all that often. The last one was in 2006 and the next one won’t be until 2019. Mercury, in its 88th day of orbit of the Sun, happens to cross the face of the sun from our view from Earth.
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