Bob Moler's Ephemeris Blog

This is Ephemeris for Monday, April 4th. Today the Sun will be up for 12 hours and 56 minutes, setting at 8:14, and it will rise tomorrow at 7:16. The Moon, 3 days past new, will set at 12:10 tomorrow morning. | We have action at both end of the night tonight. This evening the Pleiades, or Seven Sisters star cluster, will be seen just above and right of the three-day old crescent Moon. The cluster will be at the one o’clock position from the Moon at 9 pm. At the other side of night, at 6:30 tomorrow morning, Venus will be shining brilliantly in the east-southeast and the planets Mars and Saturn will be very close together. This type of appearance is called a conjunction. Mars will appear about three-quarters of a moon diameter below and left of the slightly brighter Saturn. Mars is getting slowly brighter as the Earth creeps up on it, to overtake it this December. It’s currently 165 million miles (266 million kilometers) away.

The astronomical event times given are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan (EDT, UT – 4 hours). They may be different for your location.

Addendum

The Moon and the Pleiades and Hyades tonight at 9 pm EDT, April 4, 2022. The Moon appears near the stepsister star clusters tonight. In Greek mythology, these two star clusters were indeed stepsisters, fathered by the god Atlas with different mothers. Created using Stellarium with additional captions in LibreOffice.

A Saturn-Mars conjunction with brilliant Venus nearby as it might look like tomorrow morning, April 5, 2022. Created using Stellarium with labels added in LibreOffice.