FRIDAY, APRIL 24
■ Face north just after nightfall, look very high, and you’ll find the Pointers, the end stars of the Big Dipper’s bowl, on the meridian pointing toward Polaris straight down below. From the Pointers to Polaris is about three fists at arm’s length.
And whenever the Pointers are highest there on the north meridian, Leo walks westward across the meridian at his highest in the south.
SATURDAY, APRIL 25
■ The Moon will occult 1st-magnitude Regulus for most of North and Central America today. Regulus will vanish behind the Moon’s dark limb during twilight for the much of the Eastern Seaboard, but during late afternoon’s broad daylight for telescope users farther west. Your telescope may be able to show Regulus through a clear blue sky. For full details, open Bob King’s See the Moon Hide Regulus.
The Moon in these scenes is always drawn about three times its actual apparent size. Its placement is always exact for an observer at latitude 40° N, longitude 90° W (in Illinois near the population center of North America).
SUNDAY, APRIL 26
■ In deepening evening twilight, Venus now forms a straight line between the Pleiades to its lower right and Aldebaran farther to its upper left.
And whenever Aldebaran is on its way down in the west, the V of the Hyades stars near it is always upright (for those of us in the world’s mid-northern latitudes).
■ High upper left of Venus shines Jupiter, the second-brightest planet. Look above Jupiter, by a little less than a fist at arm’s length, for Pollux and Castor lined up almost horizontally (depending on your latitude).
Pollux and Castor form the top of the enormous Arch of Spring. Lower left of them is Procyon, the Arch’s left end. Farther to their lower right is the other end, formed by 2nd-magnitude Menkalinan (Beta Aurigae) and then brilliant Capella. The whole thing sinks in the west through the evening.
MONDAY, APRIL 27
■ Action at Jupiter: The Great Red Spot should cross Jupiter’s central meridian around 9:44 p.m. EDT. The Red Spot is visible almost as easily for about an hour before and after transiting, in a good 4-inch telescope if the atmospheric seeing is sharp and steady.
Meanwhile Ganymede, Jupiter’s largest and brightest satellite, slowly reappears out from behind Jupiter’s eastern limb around 10:32 p.m. EDT. It will swell and bud off from Jupiter’s edge in the vicinity of Europa, which is heading toward Jupiter from farther out. Ganymede and Europa will draw closer together, until Ganymede disappears into eclipse by Jupiter’s shadow around 11:50 p.m. EDT.
TUESDAY, APRIL 28
■ This evening and tomorrow evening, Venus is almost equidistant from the Pleiades to its lower right and Aldebaran to its left.
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 29
■ Look for Spica about 3° left of the waxing gibbous Moon this evening. That’s about the width of two fingers held at arm’s length.
To the right of the Moon by a fist or a little more is the four-star pattern of Corvus, the Crow, sail-shaped.
Three fists upper left of Spica shines brighter Arcturus.
THURSDAY, APRIL 30
■ Today is May Eve, the traditional Beltane, the springtime opposite of Halloween. Both are about halfway from an equinox to a solstice. On these nights in parts of ancient Europe, the veil between the ordinary world and the spirit world supposedly became unusually thin and permeable. Halloween was a time for spirits of death and darkness as the season headed toward cold, dead winter. On the opposite side, May Eve could bring more felicitous sprites and apparitions with the growing warmth, light, and pastoral fertility. Think maypoles. Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream drew on such tradition, though by his time the magical fairy night had shifted to the summer solstice itself.
■ Even though May arrives at midnight tonight, wintry Sirius still twinkles very low in the west-southwest in late twilight. It sets soon after. How much longer into the spring can you keep Sirius in view before it’s gone? In other words, what will be the date of its heliacal setting as seen by you?
FRIDAY, MAY 1
■ Full Moon; exactly full at 1:23 p.m. EDT. The Moon, in Libra, rises in the east-southeast in twilight 30 or 40 minutes after sunset, depending on your location (in North America). Once the sky is dark enough, find Spica about two fists upper right of the Moon and brighter Arcturus about four fists to the Moon’s upper left.
■ Meanwhile Venus shines on the western side of the sky in twilight, above Aldebaran and the delicate Pleiades as shown below. Watch as they come into view in their order of brightness: Venus is magnitude –3.9, Aldebaran is 80 times fainter at magnitude +0.9, and the brightest star of the Pleiades (Alcyone) is six times fainter than Aldebaran at mag. +2.8.
■ And low in brightening dawn, Saturn and Mars continue to pull farther apart as shown below. On Saturday morning April 26th they were 4° apart. Now on the morning of May 2nd they’re separated by 8° as shown below. A week later on the 9th they’ll be 13° apart. The change is almost entirely due to Saturn moving up and right with respect to your dawn horizon. Mars appears to stay at nearly a fixed height.
SATURDAY, MAY 2
■ A gigantic asterism you may not know is the Great Diamond, some 50° tall and extending over five constellations, as shown below. It now leans left in the southeast after dusk, over the Moon tonight.
Start with Spica, its bottom. Upper left from Spica is bright Arcturus. Almost as far upper right from Arcturus is fainter Cor Caroli, 3rd magnitude. A similar distance lower right from there is Denebola, the 2nd-magnitude tailtip of Leo. And then back to Spica.
The bottom three of these stars, the brightest, form an equilateral triangle. The late Sky & Telescope columnist George Lovi was probably the first to name this the “Spring Triangle,” paralleling those of summer and winter.
The Great Diamond (Spica – Arcturus – Cor Caroli – Denebola) and the Spring Triangle tilt left in the southeastern sky after dark in late April and early May. The Diamond is a huge 50° tall.
If you have a dark sky, or binoculars, look almost halfway from Cor Caroli to Denebola for the very large, sparse Coma Berenices star cluster. It spans some 4°, about the size of a ping-pong ball held at arm’s length.
SUNDAY, MAY 3
■ Summer is still seven weeks away, but the Summer Triangle is beginning to make its appearance in the east, one star slowly after another. The first in view is bright Vega. It’s already visible low in the northeast as twilight fades.
Next up is Deneb, lower left of Vega by two or three fists at arm’s length. Deneb takes about an hour to appear after Vega does, depending on your latitude.
The third is Altair, which shows up far to their lower right by midnight.
This Week’s Planet Roundup
Mercury, Mars, Saturn and Neptune are very low in the brightening dawn. Mercury has swelled to about magnitude –1 (before atmospheric extinction) but it’s getting lower and will be completely gone by week’s end. Saturn and Mars are only magnitudes +0.9 and +1.2, respectively, but they’re gradually moving a little higher, and farther apart, to Mercury’s upper right. Forget 8th-magnitude Neptune.
Venus, bright at magnitude –3.9, gleams low in the west-northwest in evening twilight, a bit higher each week. In the fading twilight an hour after sunset, it beams down whitely from about 13° above horizontal. It doesn’t set now until about 40 minutes after twilight’s end.
Venus this week passes between the sinking Pleiades and Aldebaran. Venus went 3° by Pleiades on Thursday the 23rd. It forms a straight line between the Pleiades and Aldebaran on April 26th, then stands nearly equidistant from them on the 28th and 29th.
Jupiter, magnitude –2.0, is the next brightest planet after Venus. It shines high toward the west at nightfall about 40° to Venus’s upper left. Jupiter sinks through the evening and sets around 1 a.m. on the west-northwest horizon.
Watch Jupiter and Venus close in toward each other for the next seven weeks! They’ll pass 1.6° apart at their conjunction on June 9th.
Looking much closer, watch Jupiter passing little Delta Geminorum (Wasat) this week. That’s the waist of the Pollux stick figure, magnitude 3.5. On Friday April 24th Delta Gem is still 1.0° southeast of Jupiter. They pass closest, 0.6° apart, on Thursday April 30th, May Eve. Jupiter won’t pass Delta Gem again until 2037.
In a telescope Jupiter is down to 36 arcseconds wide. It continues to shrink and fade as Earth pulls farther ahead of it in our faster orbit around the Sun.
I’ve certainly been fooled! Once when I was using my 12.5-inch reflector and knew the situation beforehand, dark Callisto did seem to look a little grayer than a shadow might. But in astronomy, contrast can sure play tricks. The opposite effect happens when you see our own dark-surfaced Moon sunlit against a darker sky.
Uranus (magnitude 5.8) is a faint “star” getting farther below Venus at nightfall every day.
All descriptions that relate to your horizon — including the words up, down, right, and left — are written for the world’s mid-northern latitudes. Descriptions and graphics that also depend on longitude (mainly Moon positions) are for North America. Eastern Daylight Time (EDT) is Universal Time minus 4 hours. UT is also known as UTC, GMT, or Z time.
Want to become a better astronomer? Learn your way around the constellations. They’re the key to locating everything fainter and deeper to hunt with binoculars or a telescope.
This is an outdoor nature hobby. For a more detailed constellation guide covering the whole evening sky, use the big monthly map in the center of each issue of Sky & Telescope, the essential magazine of astronomy.
For the attitude every amateur astronomer needs, read Jennifer Willis’s Modest Expectations Give Rise to Delight.
Once you get a telescope, to put it to good use you’ll want a much more detailed, large-scale sky atlas (set of charts). The basic standard is the Pocket Sky Atlas, in either the original or Jumbo Edition. Both show all 30,000 stars to magnitude 7.6, and 1,500 deep-sky targets — star clusters, nebulae, and galaxies — to search out among them.
Next up is the larger and deeper Sky Atlas 2000.0, plotting stars to magnitude 8.5; nearly three times as many, as well as many more deep-sky objects. It’s currently out of print, but maybe you can find one used.
The next up, once you know your way around well, are the even larger Interstellarum Deep-Sky Atlas (with 201,000+ stars to magnitude 9.5 and 14,000 deep-sky objects selected to be detectable by eye in very large amateur telescopes), and Uranometria 2000.0 (332,000 stars to mag 9.75, and 10,300 deep-sky objects).
For the necessary tricks, read How to Use a Star Chart with a Telescope. It applies just as much to electronic charts on your phone or tablet — which many observers find handier and more versatile, if sometimes less well designed and contextualized For the necessary tricks, read How to Use a Star Chart with a Telescope. It applies just as much to electronic charts on your phone or tablet — which many observers find handier and more versatile, if sometimes less well designed and contextualized — as it does to charts on paper.
You’ll also want a good deep-sky guidebook. A beloved old classic is the three-volume Burnham’s Celestial Handbook. It was my bedside reading for years. An impressive more modern one is the big Night Sky Observer’s Guide set (2+ volumes) by Kepple and Sanner. The pinnacle for total astro-geeks is the new Annals of the Deep Sky series, currently at 11 volumes as it works its way forward through the constellations alphabetically. So far it’s up to H.
Can computerized telescopes replace charts? Well, I used to say this:
“Not for beginners, I don’t think, unless you prefer spending your time getting finicky technology to work rather than learning how to explore through the sky yourself. As Terence Dickinson and Alan Dyer say in their Backyard Astronomer’s Guide, ‘A full appreciation of the universe cannot come without developing the skills to find things in the sky and understanding how the sky works. This knowledge comes only by spending time under the stars with star maps in hand and a curious mind.’ Without these, ‘the sky never becomes a friendly place.’ “
But things do change. The technology has continued to improve and become more user-friendly — particularly with “plate solving” software that can now recognize any star field to determine exactly where the telescope is pointed — finally bypassing all aiming imperfections in the mount, tripod, gears, bearings and other mechanics, or in the user’s skill in setting up.
The latest revolution is the rise of small, photography-only “smartscopes.” These take advantage of not only today’s pointing technology, but also the vastly better capabilities of imaging chips and image processing compared to the human retina and visual cortex. The most sophisticated image stacking and processing can come built right in. The result is decent deep-sky imaging from shockingly small, low-priced units. The image may be viewable on your phone or computer as it builds up in real time. Some can directly enable contributions to citizen-science projects.
Smartscopes are changing the hobby at the entry level. For more on this revolution see Richard Wright’s “The Rise of the Smart Telescopes” in the November 2025 Sky & Telescope. And read the magazine’s review of this especially small one.
If you get a larger, more conventional computerized scope that you can look through, make sure that its drives can be disengaged so you can swing it around and point it readily by hand when you want to, rather than only slowly by the electric motors (which eat batteries).
Audio sky tour. Out under the evening sky with your
earbuds in place, listen to Kelly Beatty’s monthly
podcast tour of the naked-eye heavens above. It’s free.
“The dangers of not thinking clearly are much greater now than ever before. It’s not that there’s something new in our way of thinking, it’s that credulous and confused thinking can be much more lethal in ways it was never before.”
— Carl Sagan, 1996 , The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
“Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”
— John Adams, 1770, in the summation of his defense of British soldiers in the Boston Massacre trial
“Truly, whoever can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
— Voltaire, 1765, Questions sur les miracles