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Tickets are still on sale for the last show of the spring season at the William M Thomas Planetarium: Black Holes on April 24. Tomorrow, April 20, is the end of 太阳城官网鈥檚 spring break and the last weekend of the Bakersfield area schools鈥� spring break. That鈥檚 because they have their spring breaks in the week before Easter, which is tied to the timing of the full moon and the March equinox. 

Easter is the first Sunday after the which is usually the full moon after the Christian Church鈥檚 equinox on March 21 as based on observations from Jerusalem. The is when the midpoint of the Sun is exactly on the celestial equator (projection of Earth鈥檚 equator onto the sky) heading northward. Depending on leap years and other factors, the astronomical equinox can vary between March 19 and March 21 (this year鈥檚 spring equinox was in the early hours of March 20). The Christian Church鈥檚 equinox is set to March 21. The Paschal Full Moon is the 14th day of the lunar month that includes the equinox and the Paschal Full moon. It can be as much as two days off from the . With all of these parameters, Easter can be as early as March 22 and as late as April 25. Rather than trying to do all of the calculations yourself for finding the Easter date, it鈥檚 much easier to use the tables that have been worked out long ago or enter 鈥淓aster XXXX鈥� into Google to get the Easter date for year XXXX.

Tomorrow the moon will be at and the following night will be the peak of the Lyrid meteor shower. The fat waning crescent moon (35% illuminated) will rise around 3:20 a.m. the morning of April 22, so you will have dark skies for meteor observing before then. The Lyrid meteor shower is caused by Earth plowing through the by Comet C/1861 G1 (Thatcher) and the dust bits hit our atmosphere at 29 miles/second. Usually, sharp-eyed observers will see 15 to 20 meteors per hour but every 60 years, outbursts of up to 90 meteors/hour have been seen. The last outburst was in 1982, so the next one should happen in 2042 but the Lyrids could always surprise us. 

The radiant of the shower is in between the bright star of Lyra, , and Hercules. In fact, the modern boundary of Hercules actually encloses the radiant but being among the oldest of known meteor showers with records from Chinese observers going back to 687 BCE, the Lyrids were associated with Lyra long before the modern boundaries were set. The star chart above shows the sky centered on the radiant with the moon just beginning to rise. On the night of the peak, Vega and the radiant of the Lyrids will become visible rising in the east at about 10:30 p.m. on April 21. 

In tonight鈥檚 sky, Jupiter blazes away halfway up in the west shortly after sunset. It has been moving closer to the left horn of Taurus this past month. Mars is now midway between Gemini and Cancer and is still brighter than the brightest stars of Gemini, and . All three objects are approximately lined up on the sky. Mars is also approximately lined up with the bright stars of the dog constellations, in Canis Minor and in Canis Major. Shortly after sunset, say about 8 p.m., face south-southwest. Starting low with very bright Sirius (only Jupiter is brighter) about a third way up in the sky, you鈥檒l see moving up: Sirius, Procyon, and then Mars equally spaced with Mars almost directly overhead. 

Although NASA鈥檚 entire budget is less than half of one percent of the federal budget (i.e., for every federal dollar spent, NASA gets less than half a penny), the proposed cuts would kill just about all of its future science missions and seriously hobble current missions. There will be continuing support for Hubble and Webb but the already fully-assembled and on budget set to launch in just two years would never make it off the ground. Although Roman鈥檚 mirror is the same size as Hubble鈥檚, Roman will have a . It has a to block starlight, so that it鈥檒l be able to directly see exoplanets and complete a statistical census of planetary systems in our galaxy as well as settle vexing questions in the areas of dark matter, dark energy, exoplanets, and other areas of astrophysics. 

In some past columns I鈥檝e described the from the work that NASA does as it invents systems to explore the universe beyond Earth and the Earth itself (there are more science鈥攏on-weather鈥攕atellites examining Earth than spacecraft looking outward). The spinoffs include all sorts of applications in computers, robotics, medical, energy-generation, and other areas. One dollar spent on NASA generates a return of seven dollars to the economy. Besides the technology, the even more important spinoff is the training of engineers to solve really difficult problems, regardless of the application. Let鈥檚 hope that Congress sees the value of that half penny!

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Director of the William M Thomas Planetarium at 太阳城官网

Author of the award-winning website