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The belt and “bow tie” of Orion were nicely low in the sky, easy to see from a bus window as we were going back from the astronomy conference Nightingale Valley Stars 2009 by bus along the Tartu motorway last Saturday about eight o’clock in the evening. Actually this bow tie shape is the hunter Orion – belt at waist, shoulders up, feet at bottom. But if you don’t remember the hunter figure then it is easy to recognise this star constellation in the sky as a bow tie.

March is a good month for observing the sky, particularly when considering that clear nights are becoming more and more rare. Astronomer Tõnu Viik said at the conference above that in his student days, some decades ago, there were about a hundred clear nights in Estonia each year and now only about seventy. So the clear weather in March is a gift to sky observers. For amateur observers too: to start with Orion is shining nicely in the evenings – the dark still falls quite early and it is not necessary to wait for the night to see stars. Looking to the south from Orion is Sirius, low and very bright. And Venus is very interesting now because according to the astronomers in the next few days it is both a dawn and a dusk star, to be seen in the evening as well as in the morning.

 

In the summer nights, when we mostly look at stars, the sky is completely different. Where is for instance the Plough, or the Big Dipper, now?