Special to CosmicTribune.com, August 28, 2025

Excerpts from weekly Sky&Telescope report.

SUNDAY, MARCH 2

■ February was Orion’s month to stand at his highest in the south in early evening. Now March pushes him westward and spotlights his dog, Canis Major with Sirius on his chest, standing center stage on the meridian.

Sirius is not only the brightest star in our sky after the Sun, at a distance of 8.6 light-years it’s also the closest naked-eye star after the Sun for those of us living at mid-northern latitudes.

Alpha Centauri is the actual closest star at 4.3 light-years, but you have to be farther south to see it.

MONDAY, MARCH 3

A Naked-Eye Venus Challenge this Week! Some people can resolve the crescent of Venus with their unaided eyes when it’s as large and thin as it is now. Mere 20/20 vision probably isn’t good enough; success may require 20/15, 20/12, 0r (very rare) 20/10 vision. Try early in twilight before the sky becomes too dark and Venus too glary.

You may improve your chances by sighting through a clean, round hole in a thick piece of paper about 1 mm, 2mm, or 3mm in diameter held right next to your eye (try them all). It will mask out optical aberrations that are common away from the center of your eye’s cornea and lens. Try each eye.

One person who apparently succeeded was Edgar Allan Poe. An amateur astronomer since boyhood, he used a naked-eye sighting of Venus’s crescent as the central event in his poem “Ulalume” (1847) near the end of his life. Before dawn, a bereaved lover roams a misty October woodland accompanied by “Psyche, my soul.” Ahead of them low in the east, where the constellation Leo ascends before dawn in mid-autumn, they witness the new-risen Venus, star of romantic love in Roman mythology, coming “up through the lair of the Lion.” Poe refers to the planet as Astarte — the wilder, more wanton Greek version of the Romans’ Venus goddess:

And now, as the night was senescent,
And star-dials pointed to morn —
As the star-dials hinted of morn —
At the end of our path a liquescent
And nebulous lustre was born,
Out of which a miraculous crescent
Arose with a duplicate horn—
Astarte’s bediamonded crescent
Distinct with its duplicate horn.

TUESDAY, MARCH 4

■ The thick crescent Moon shines lower right of the Pleiades, Jupiter, and Aldebaran this evening, as shown below.

Now it’s Jupiter’s turn to say hello to the passing Moon.

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 5

■ Catch the almost-first-quarter Moon about 7° from Jupiter this evening, as shown in late twilight above.

THURSDAY, MARCH 6

■ First-quarter Moon (exactly so at 11:32 a.m. EST). That 2nd-magnitude star near the Moon this evening is Beta Tauri.

FRIDAY, MARCH 7

■ The Moon, just past first quarter, shines upper right of the Mars-Castor-Pollux triangle as the stars come out, as shown below.

As evening progresses, the whole arrangement quickly rotates clockwise as it moves westward across the sky if you turn to keep facing them directly. Such rapid rotation always happens for patterns passing near the zenith.

By as early as 8 p.m. the Moon will be directly right of Mars when you stand facing them.

Catch the waxing gibbous Moon pairing with Mars on Saturday the evening March 8th. They’ll be 1½° apart, about three Moon diameters, when closest together as seen from the middle of North America. The Moon here is always drawn about 3 times its actual apparent size. In addition, the Moon appears located slightly differently against its background depending on where on Earth you’ve viewing in from.

SATURDAY, MARCH 8

■ The Moon horns in on the Mars-Castor-Pollux triangle this evening, as indicated above. Watch the Moon also change its separation with respect to background objects as the hours pass. The Moon travels eastward along its orbit by almost one Moon diameter per hour.

SUNDAY, MARCH 9

■ It’s not spring for a couple more weeks, but the Spring Star Arcturus seems eager to get rolling. It now rises above the east-northeast horizon around 9 p.m. daylight-saving time, depending on your location.

To see where to watch for Arcturus-rise, find the Big Dipper as soon as the stars come out; it’s high in the northeast. Follow the curve of the Dipper’s handle down and around to the lower right by a little more than a Dipper-length. That’s the spot on the horizon to watch.

By 11 p.m. Arcturus quite dominates the eastern sky.

  March 2-9: Seeing the Venus crescent, The Sky