| | October 2010
| | Planet notes: Jupiter remains brilliant moving across the northern sky to set in the west before sunrise. Mars will hold its position in the evening sky in October.
During October there will be three planetary conjunctions with the Sun, when a planet passes between Earth and the Sun or directly behind the Sun from Earth.
Mercury and Venus, which orbit the Sun in the space between Earth and the Sun move more quickly around the Sun than we do. Mercury, the closest to the Sun, completes an orbit every 88 Earth days, so that slightly more than 4 Mercurian years pass during every Earth year. Orbiting farther from the Sun, the Venusian year is almost 225 Earth days long. When one of these two inner planets passes directly between us and the Sun it is said to be in “inferior conjunction”. When it passes directly opposite the Sun from us it is said to be in "superior conjunction".
| | 1st | - | Saturn will pass directly opposite the Sun from us – simple conjunction with the Sun
| | 8th | - | new moon.
| | 9th | - | The fifth Maori month, Whiringa-nuku, begins.
| | 17th | - | Mercury will pass on the opposite side of the Sun from us - superior conjunction
| | 18th | - | a very long line will extend from the Sun through the Earth all the way out to dwarf planet Eris in the far reaches of the Solar System. Eris will be in opposition. This straight line only appears when the Solar System is viewed from above or below. That is because Eris' orbit is highly tilted compared to ours so that, looking at the Solar System from the side, Eris will usually appear well above or below the plane in which Earth orbits the Sun. At its great distance Eris takes 557 years to complete one highly elliptical (almost 3 times as long as it is wide ) orbit around the Sun. Just now it is near the part of its orbit that takes it farthest from the Sun, almost 97 times farther than Earth! Sometime around the Earth year 2257 Eris will reach the closest part of its orbit, only about 37 times as far from the Sun as Earth. At that future point Eris, with its lone moon Dysnomia, will actually be inside the orbit of distant Pluto.
| | 23rd | - | full moon
| | 29th | - | Venus will rapidly drop lower in the western sky throughout the month and become lost in the glare of the setting Sun before passing directly between us and the Sun today - inferior conjunction.
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| | September 2010
| | Planet notes:Venus, Mars and Saturn will continue their slow dance in the western evening sky. The planets can be distinguished from the stars by their motion in our sky. The stars simply whirl around and around our night sky as Earth turns and moves around the Sun throughout the year. The planets, known as planetis meaning wanderer to the ancient Greeks, each appear to be moving back and forth in our sky against the background of stars, as they move around the Sun in their individual orbits.
At the beginning of last month Saturn overtook both Mars and Venus to drop lower and lower in the west each night. Setting a little after 8p.m at the beginning of September it will be lost in the twilight by mid-month as we pull away from it to the other side of the Sun. Brilliant Venus has crossed paths with Mars as its orbit brings it closer and closer to us, and will be setting after the red planet during September, around 10p.m. Venus and Mars will be sharing the evening sky with Jupiter rising higher in the east throughout the month. Our orbit is bringing us closer to Jupiter every day until we pass it on the 21st. While Jupiter is the largest planet in our Solar System and appears very bright and beautiful in our sky, it is always outshone by our close neighbour Venus.
| | 3rd | - | Today Mercury, which has been approaching us for a couple of weeks and is now setting too close to the Sun to be seen, will pass directly between us and the Sun. This is the position known as inferior conjunction of a planet that orbits the Sun inside of our orbit.
| | 8th | - | new moon. The Jewish calendar, like the Maori and Muslim calendars, is lunar, following the cycles of the moon. The Jewish New Year and month of Tishrei begin at sunset this night
| | 9th | - | The fourth Maori month, Mahuru, begins.
| | 21st | - | Jupiter is in opposition
| | 22nd | - | Uranus is in opposition.
These two events put these two outer planets in a straight line with Earth and the Sun, and bring us to our closest approach to them during this orbit.
| | 23rd | - | full moon and the spring equinox both occur today. For much of the world the equinoxes, when the Sun crosses over the equator, and the solstices, when the Sun reaches its most northerly and southerly extents, indicate the start of the new seasons. Today the Sun crosses the equator from north to south bringing more hours and warmer hours of sunlight to the southern hemisphere. Spring for the Maori is traditionally heralded by the first rising in the dawn sky of the star Regulus, Te Kakau in Te Reo. This star is part of the constellation Leo the Lion and will make its first appearance this month.
| | 26th | - | The start of Daylight Savings Time in New Zealand. This morning 2 a.m. will become 3 a.m. and we will lose an hour of sleep.
| | Planet notes: A scientific paper published last month describes an astronomical discovery of great interest that was made by "ordinary citizens". Not even amateur astronomers, the American couple from Iowa and the German systems analyst have volunteered their PCs’ down time to a program called Einstein@home which uses the computers of more than 250,000 volunteers in 192 countries to analyse astronomical data. While looking at data from Arecibo Observatory, a large Radio telescope in Puerto Rico, their computers discovered an object known as a radio pulsar. The exotic star is in our galaxy and rotates 41 times per second emitting radio waves from a jet that repeatedly bathes the Earth as it sweeps round and round with the regularity of a cosmic lighthouse. The pulsar was probably formed in the violent supernova collapse of the core of a massive star and is now about the same mass as one and a half or two of our Suns crammed into a ball just 12 kilometers in diameter. There are several similar so-called distributed computing projects offering an exciting way for ordinary folk to participate in scientific discovery in a number of fields, in a technological world that is rapidly producing more and more data requiring incredible amounts of computing time to evaluate it.
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| | August 2010
| | Planet notes: Venus, Saturn, and Mars will be mixing it up in the western sky throughout the month, with Venus setting a little later each night, Mars setting a little earlier each night, and Saturn, having dropped below Mars at the end of July, setting much earlier each night. Their order in the sky at the beginning of the month will be very bright Venus setting a little after 9p.m. followed shortly by a much more dim Saturn just next to an even dimmer and slightly warmer tinged Mars. Saturn and Mars will be in conjunction. Then, on the 10th, the night of the August new moon, Saturn will have overtaken Venus and these two planets will be in conjunction. By the end of the month Saturn will set around 8p.m. followed nearly 2 hours later by Mars, with Venus setting last. Venus and Mars will cross paths around the 21st and will be in conjunction on the 23rd.
Meanwhile, earlier in the west, Mercury will be visible setting before all the others between 7 and 8p.m. each night. Also throughout the month, on the other side of the sky, brilliant Jupiter will be rising in the east around the same time that Saturn is setting in the west.
Mid-month an observer looking down from a position high above the plane of the Solar System would see the planets scattered around but all located on the same side of the Sun.
| | 10th | - | new moon
| | 11th | - | The third Maori month, Otoru, begins
| | 20th | - | oday Neptune will be in opposition. Again, looking down from that position high above the plane of the Solar System, Neptune, Earth and the Sun would be in a straight line, our closest approach to Neptune during this orbit.
| | 25th | - | full moon at around 5 a.m.
Today is also the anniversary of the launch of the Spitzer Space Telescope (SST) from Cape Canaveral in 2003. While the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) is in orbit around Earth, Spitzer orbits the Sun in what is called an Earth-trailing orbit. If follows Earth in our path around the Sun, but more slowly, dropping farther behind each year. It is currently more than 123 million kilometres away from us, nearly our own distance from the Sun.
Spitzer observes the universe in infrared radiation, beyond the realm of visible light, which is very useful since every object that has a temperature above absolute zero (-273.15 degrees Celsius) emits infrared radiation. It can see and image things that are otherwise invisible to us such as its surprise discovery last year of the enormous cold ring of dust accompanying the moon Phoebe around Saturn. Its infrared images of the core of our Milky Way Galaxy show stars racing around what is believed to be the supermassive black hole at the centre. Our first direct images of radiation from extra-solar planets were made by the SST, as well as images of a planet-forming disk around another star. It is thought that some of its images have captured light given off by the first stars that formed in our universe, when it was only 100 million years old.
| | By the end of the month the Sun will be rising 41 minutes earlier than at the start, and setting 29 minutes later giving us well over an hour more of daylight. Spring should be well on its way.
The Mars rover, Spirit, has hibernated over a long Mars winter under particularly difficult conditions due to its location. It is hoped that it will be waking up and phoning home sometime in the next couple of months. Watch this space.
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| | July 2010
| Planet notes: Mars has been moving quickly in our sky, against the east-to-west flow of the so-called fixed stars, closing on Saturn. By the end of the month it will have passed Saturn, they will be in conjunction, and will set together in the west around 10 pm. An hour earlier you will see Venus dropping toward the horizon. By mid-month, Mercury, quite visible, will be setting 2 hours before, below and to the left of Venus. Jupiter is rising earlier in the east each night, after 10pm at the end of the month.
| | 12th | - | New moon and partial solar eclipse in the South Pacific.
New moon occurs when the moon passes between Earth and the Sun. The moon, being in the sunlight, casts a long shadow behind it. If the moon's orbit around Earth was always the same, and carried it exactly across a direct line between Earth and the Sun, then every lunar month Earth would briefly move into the shadow of the new moon, a solar eclipse. But, it is not so simple as that because the plane of the moon's orbit tilts up and down as it goes around so that it is usually slightly above or below that direct line between the Sun and Earth. But sometimes its orbit carries the moon, or part of it, directly between Earth and Sun. As the moon passes between, its deep shadow, the umbra, a circle about 250 km in diameter when it intercepts Earth, sweeps across our rotating surface. Total solar eclipse is in the path of the umbra. The umbra is surrounded by a much larger area of lesser shadow, the penumbra, the region of partial eclipse. The umbra of the July new moon will pass across the South Pacific Ocean at sunrise on the 12th, touching land on several islands and a small patch of Chile and Argentina.
| | 13th | - | First day of new Maori month, Honganui.
| | 20th | - | Forty one years ago Commander Neil Aldan Armstrong of the Apollo 11 mission, and Lunar Module Pilot Edwin Eugene "Buzz" Aldrin, Jr. became the first Earthlings to set foot off-planet, onto another celestial body.
| | 26th | - | Full moon.
| | 30th | - | Four hundred years ago on July 30th Galileo turned to Saturn with his 20-power telescope and saw what he took to be 2 separate bodies, one on each side of the planet. Two years later they were gone when Saturn's orientation put the rings edge-on, then reappearing as crescents 4 years later. The confusion only began to abate in 1655 when Christian Huygens looked with his more powerful telescope and proposed that Saturn was surrounded by a single thin, flat, solid ring. It was 200 more years before the rings were accepted as not solid, but consisting of a very large number of very small particles, each in orbit around the planet.
| Special note: In March of 2004 the European Space Agency, ESA, launched the Rosetta Spacecraft to chase down and liaise with a comet in 2014. Rosetta's many adventures along the way have included a fly by of Mars to get a "slingshot" gravity boost in speed, and three similar swings back around Earth to boost it to ever higher speeds. In 2008 Rosetta flew within 800 kilometers and took pictures of a small main-belt asteroid called Stein, a rock about 5 kilometers in diameter. If you have access to a computer you can see the images at http://www.esa.int/images/Steins-FlyBy-Mosaic.jpg. On the 10th of July (Europe time) Rosetta will fly past the much larger main-belt asteroid Lutetia at a distance of about 3000 kilometres. Most of the asteroids are quite small and distant, making it difficult for ground-based telescopes to get a good look at them. We have indications that Lutetia may be around 130 km long (just about filling the area from Mt Cook to Wanaka), is spinning, and, like most of the debris in the asteroid belt, has an irregular shape. Rosetta's camera OSIRIS will image the big rock and send pictures back the same day. Some of its 11 scientific instruments will be used to determine what Lutetia is made of.
The last 2 years of Rosetta's 12-year mission will be spent in an intimate encounter with Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko as it approaches the Sun. Stay tuned for that amazing show starting in May 2014. Meanwhile, watch the news for Lutetia's photo op, on the 10th or 11 of July, or check the ESA web site.
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| | June 2010
| | Planet notes: A brilliant Venus will appear in the northwest soon after sunset making the planet our "evening star". As its orbit carries it out to the side of the Sun as viewed from here (Earth) it will set a little later each night. Mars appears to be approaching Saturn, crossing the sky from West to East, and by the end of July they will set together.
Brilliant Jupiter, almost as bright as Venus, will be rising in the east after midnight. One of Jupiter's two main belts of brown cloud vanished last month leaving the great red spot surrounded by white.
You will be able to see Mercury in the northeast sky around 6am at the beginning of the month. Rising later each day, it will disappear into the light of the Sun by the middle of the month.
| | 2nd | - | The heliacal rising of Matariki, known also as the Pleiades Cluster or 7 Sisters. This event occurs in the moment just before dawn when the cluster is visible for the first time since its disappearance from the night sky. It was historically an important seasonal signal for many Maori iwi, and now heralds the start of the Maori new year which occurs after the next new moon.
| | 12th | - | New moon.
| | 13th | - | First day of new Maori month of Pipiri and of the new Maori year
| | 18th | - | Earth crosses in a direct line between the Sun and dwarf planet Ceres. This position relative to an outer planet body is called opposition. Ceres is a member of the main asteroid belt, rocky rubble circling the Sun between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.
| | 19th | - | 27 years ago a man-made object and true pioneer, the Pioneer 10 spacecraft, went where no man-made object had gone before. It became our first emissary to pass beyond all of the Sun's planets on its way out of the Solar System. Along its way it was also the first spacecraft to travel through the asteroid belt and the first to send us images of Jupiter. Pioneer 10 was our first probe into the outer regions of the Solar System from where it reported back new information on the solar wind, magnetic fields, intergalactic cosmic rays and interplanetary dust, until the end of its mission in 1997. Now it is heading outward from the Sun in the direction of the red giant star Aldebaran, the bright eye of Taurus the Bull, more than 2 million years away at the spacecraft's current speed. The final weak signal from Pioneer 10 was received on the 22nd of January, 2003, almost 31 years after its launch from Cape Canaveral.
| | 21st | - | Winter Solstice occurs around 11pm in New Zealand when the Sun reaches its most northern position in the sky and reverses direction. The number of daylight hours will slowly lengthen from this point.
| | 25th | - | Earth crosses in a direct line between the Sun and dwarf planet Pluto. As with Ceres, this position relative to an outer planet body is called opposition. Pluto is a member of the Kuiper belt, mostly icy rubble that extends far beyond the orbit of the most distant planet, Neptune.
| | 26th | - | Full moon.
| | 28th | - | By today Mercury will have moved right around to the far side of the Sun. This alignment of an inner planet (Mercury or Venus) and the Sun with Earth on the other side is known as superior conjunction.
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| | May 2010
| Special notes: You probably won't have noticed, but may be interested to learn, that Earth's rotational speed has slowed a bit as a result of the 8.8 earthquake in Chile in February. The advanced research group at the Institute of Geodesy and Geophysics at the Vienna University of Technology (TU Vienna) advises that our 24-hour day has become longer, 3 tenths of a microsecond longer. The hard-hit port city of Concepcion moved nearly 3 metres west and over half a metre south of its previous location. The earthquake shifted a significant mass, deforming the Earth and affecting its rotation. We are not used to thinking of our planetary home as an astronomical object, but we study it in great detail, much as we do the other planetary bodies in our Solar System, measuring its motion through space, shape, and tilt to the Sun.
Geology, strictly interpreted, is the scientific study of Earth, "Ge" in ancient Greek, as a planet – its composition, and structure, and the history of the dynamic processes that formed it. The same study is Areology when applied to the planet Mars, "Ares" being the ancient Greek god of war known as Mars to the Romans. With the confirmation of 452 exoplanets so far, these are planets beyond our Solar System, planetary scientists have a lot more examples to work with. The majority of exoplanets thus far identified are large gas giants like Jupiter, orbiting other stars. Smaller, more earth-like planets are harder to find, but as our technologies improve we are discovering more and more of them.
| Planet notes: Mars is now little brighter than Saturn, as the two approach one another in our night sky. By the end of July they will set together. Mars now appears about the same size and orange brightness of Betelguese, the nearby red supergiant star to the west in Orion. Saturn is still to the east of north, around halfway up in the sky. When the upper atmosphere is calm, Saturn can be distinguished from nearby twinkling stars by its unblinking and steady golden glow. This year the rings of Saturn as seen from Earth are still nearly edge-on, appearing through a small telescope merely as a short bar sticking out on each side of the planet.
Jupiter will be rising in the east after 3am at the beginning of the month, around an hour earlier by the 31st. An hour before sunrise it will be bright and high in the northeast sky. If you have located Jupiter at the end of the month you will have a rare opportunity to easily spot more distant Uranus. Barely visible to the best eyes, you will find it quickly with a pair of binoculars just to the lower right of Jupiter at a distance of approximately 2 full moon diameters. Mercury will be on the opposite side of the Sun from the "evening star" Venus so will be visible in the morning before sunrise. Your best opportunity this year to see Mercury in the dark pre-dawn sky will occur on the 26. It will be visible especially during the latter part of the month low in the east.
| Star Notes The beautiful bright star now twinkling in the northeast is Arcturus. It vies with our nearest stellar neighbour, Alpha Centauri, for the position as third brightest star in the sky. Of the two, Arcturus is intrinsically much brighter, being between 8 and 9 times farther away from us. Early Polynesians called Arcturus, Hokule'a, the Star of Joy.
| | 14th | - | New moon.
| | 15th | - | The first day of Haratua, the 12th and final month of the current Maori year.
| | 28th | - | Full moon.
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| | April 2010
| Special notes:Early in March the Mars Express orbiter made some very close flybys of one of Mars' moons, Phobos. Many of the amazing high resolution images obtained are available to view at the European Space Agency (ESA) website, www.esa.int. Click on Previous News / "Phobos Flyby Images".
| | Planet notes:Mars is bright but dimming, as we leave it behind in its slower orbit around the Sun. We just passed by Saturn on March 22nd so it will also be growing a little dimmer each night. Saturn and Mars have been drifting apart in our night sky, but in April the distance between them begins to close until by the end of July they will set together.
From our vantage point, Jupiter, Venus, and Mercury are all gathered close by the Sun this month. Venus and Mercury are in the evening sky setting soon after the Sun making Mercury very difficult to see while Venus, higher in the sky and brighter, will be briefly visible in the evening twilight. Jupiter, on the opposite side of the Sun as viewed from Earth, will be rising earlier each day, easily visible before the Sun in the eastern morning twilight at the beginning of the month.
| | 12th | - | In 1961 Uri Gagarin made his historic flight into space in the 2.3 meter spherical crew compartment of a Soviet Vostock 3KA spacecraft. The flight lasted just under 2 hours, 89 1/2 minutes of which were spent completing a single orbit of the Earth. Gagarin, officially the pilot of the craft, did not have control of its flight, since the effects of weightlessness and spaceflight on the human body and psyche were as yet unknown. The first man in outer space was 27 years old.
| | 14th | - | New moon is just after midnight this night, actually ccurring therefore on the 15th of the month.
| | 16th | - | The lunar Maori month of Paenga-whawha begins.
| | 25th | - | Anzac Day in New Zealand, falls on the 20th anniversary of the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope, carried aloft in the cargo bay of the Space Shuttle Discovery. Astronauts on five Space Shuttle missions have maintained and repaired the telescope over the 20 years, and its various scientific instruments have been replaced and upgraded. Hubble, the size of a large school bus, orbits 569 km above Earth. It completes an orbit every 97 minutes, moving right along at the dizzying speed of about 8 kilometers per second.
Hubble's primary mirror is 2.4 meters in diameter, just over half a meter larger than the MOA telescope mirror on Mt John. As telescope mirrors go it is not large, but its position far above Earth affords it premier seeing capability, unaffected by the vagaries of our atmosphere. Hubble's computers, science instruments, guidance, data storage and transmission are powered by the Sun. Some of the electricity produced is stored in batteries to run the telescope while it traverses the night side of our planet. The Flight Operations Team at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, use satellites to communicate with the telescope. Hubble's successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, is expected to be ready for launch in June 2014. The images and data returned by Hubble have vastly expanded our knowledge, fueled our passions, and revolutionized our understanding of our expanding universe. It will be a hard act to follow.
| | 28th | - | Full moon is just after midnight this night, actually occurring therefore on the 29th of the month.
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| | March 2010
| Special notes:There will be several planetary alignments with Earth this month as well as a Blue Moon. This month also we can celebrate the birthdays, lives, spirit, and courage of the first man and first woman to go into space.
| | 1st | - | Full moon, the first this month, the third this year.
| | | - | Jupiter in conjunction, on the far side of the Sun from Earth
| | 3rd | - | The Mars Express orbiter, a project of ESA, the European Space Agency, will make a very close pass over Phobos, the larger of Mars' two moons. It will skim just over 50 kilometres above the moon's cratered surface doing, among other things, radar mapping and gravity field measurements. Phobos has presented scientists with a mystery ever since previous measurements of its volume and mass indicated that there may be significant hollow parts. This mission hopes to generate a map of the moon's interior.
Phobos, which is not a sphere but is very roughly 22 kilometres across on average, is the target of a planned Russian mission, Phobos-Grunt. The Mars Express' High Resolution Stereo Camera will be getting close-up images of potential landing sites.
| | 6th | - | The birthday, in 1937 in the then Soviet Union, of Valentina Tereshkova. In 1963 she piloted the Russian mission Vostok 6 for 3 days.
| | 9th | - | The birthday, in 1934 in the Soviet Union, of Yuri Gagarin. In 1961 he became the first human to go into space.
| | 15th | - | Mercury in superior conjunction (superior is for an inner planet)
| | 16th | - | New moon.
| | | - | Dwarf planet Makemake in opposition, Earth between the Sun and Makemake
| | 17th | - | the first day of the 10th Maori month, Poutu-te-rangi.
| | 18th | - | Uranus in conjunction
| | 21st | - | Vernal (autumnal) equinox – the hours of daylight and dark are almost equal. From now, day in the southern hemisphere will grow shorter until the winter solstice in June
| | 22nd | - | Saturn at opposition
| | 30th | - | Blue Moon, the second full moon this month and the fourth in the first quarter of this year.
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| | February 2010
| | Special notes: Bright, orange-tinted Mars remains prominent in our night sky but is now receding from us and will grow dimmer over the coming months. Dimmer Saturn rises earlier and a little brighter each night, around 10pm at the beginning of the month.
Very bright Jupiter and Venus will appear close above the horizon after sunset for most of the month. Jupiter will be above Venus until the 17th when Venus will just nudge past it. Do not try to spot them before sunset as they are too close to the Sun and you may damage your eyes. By the 28th Jupiter will have disappeared behind the Sun and will be in conjunction meaning that a line joining Earth and Jupiter will pass directly through the Sun in between.
There is no full Moon in February (in New Zealand's time zone), being usurped by 2 full moons in January and again in March (1st and 30th of each month). March 30 will see the second Blue Moon in 2010, being the second full moon in the same month and the fourth full moon in the quarter.
| | 14th | - | New moon.
Chinese New Year
| | 15th | - | The first day of the 9th Maori month, Hui-tanguru
Neptune in conjunction with the Sun, on the opposite side of the Sun from Earth.
| | 18th & 19th | - | We celebrate the births of two great Renaissance astronomers this month, the Italian Galileo Galilei in 1564, and Nicolaus Copernicus nearly a century earlier in 1473 in the Kingdom of Poland. Both men were devoted Roman Catholics, but Copernicus expounded and Galileo championed the heliocentric (Sun-centred) view of the universe, in opposition to the Church’s cherished geocentric, or Earth-centred view. It was Pope John Paul II who centuries later vindicated Galileo and his scientific efforts.
| | 20th | - | ain Belt asteroid, Vesta, is in opposition, in line with Earth and the Sun with Earth in the middle. Vesta, the second largest asteroid after Ceres, has been considered for inclusion in the category of Dwarf Planets.
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| | January 2010
| | Special notes: Mars, bright and a bit rusty looking, is rising earlier and earlier in the northeast, around 9pm by the end of the month. So it is quite prominent by 11:00 when the sky is fully dark. During the 29th and 30th our orbit will carry us past Mars, bringing us into alignment between it and the Sun. This is the closest we will come to Mars during this orbit, hence its brilliance in our sky. Following Mars’ path in our sky a couple of hours later will be Saturn, more dim, with a slightly golden hue.
At the end of December there was a lot of publicity in New Zealand about a Blue Moon occurring on the 31st. In recent years the second full moon in a given calendar month has been called "Blue". In earlier times the term referred only to the 4th full moon in a three-month period.
That Dec 31st full moon actually occurred around 8am NZ time, on the first day of January, which was, of course, still the 31st of December in much of the rest of the world. But for us, here in New Zealand our blue moon is occurring much later. We have a full moon at the beginning and at the end of January, no full moon in February (only 28 days), and full moon again at the beginning and end of March. So here in New Zealand we will definitely have a Blue Moon at the end of March, the fourth full moon in the first quarter of 2010, and, if you subscribe to the more modern definition, a Blue Moon also at the end of January, the second full moon in the calendar month.
| | 1st | - | Full moon
| | 15th | - | New moon.
Also this day the Sun moves into Capricornus. What this actually means is that the Earth, in its annual trek around the Sun, will pass on the opposite side of the Sun from the constellation Capricorn. Or, in other words, Capricorn will be behind the Sun as viewed from Earth - the Sun IN Capricorn - so that Capricorn will be in our sky during the day and will not be visible at all at night. If you were born in the latter half of January or the first part of February, your astrological "star sign" is said to be Capricorn because that is where the Sun, our star, appears during that time.
| | 16th | - | the beginning of the 8th Maori month, Kohi-tatea
| | 30th | - | Mars in opposition (see above)
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