This is Ephemeris for Wednesday, March 19th. Today the Sun will be up for 12 hours and 7 minutes, setting at 7:54, and it will rise tomorrow at 7:45. The Moon, 3 days before last quarter, will rise at 1:53 tomorrow morning.
Let’s take our weekly look at the whereabouts of the naked-eye planets. At 9 PM this evening just two of the five naked eye planets will be out. Venus and Mercury are too close to the Sun in the twilight to be seen. Saturday and Monday Venus and then Mercury will pass between the Earth and the Sun to enter the morning sky. Jupiter, now becomes the brightest evening planet. It will be high in the southwest. Below it is the bright star Aldebaran with the stars of the Hyades, the face of Taurus the bull, and to the lower left, the great constellation of Orion, The rapidly fading Mars, with its distinctive reddish hue, is high in the south, with the stars Castor and Pollux in Gemini above it.
The astronomical event times given are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan (EDT, UT – 4 hours). Times will be different for other locations.
Addendum
Jupiter, and Mars seen high in the southwest with some of the constellations of winter at 9:00 PM tonight, March 19th 2025. Created using Stellarium.
The Moon tonight, March 19th 2025, in it’s 9 PM orientation, as it might appear in a small telescope. Selected features are labeled. Created using Stellarium, LibreOffice Draw, and GIMP.
Telescopic Jupiter (north up) as it would be seen in a small telescope. Jupiter is shown for tonight, 9 PM, March 19, 2025. Its apparent diameter is 38.1″. Mars is 9.1″ in diameter, too small to be shown here. My lower size limit is 10″. Planetary surface detail is more subtle than shown here. Note that Io is transiting Jupiter at 9 PM. It will be nearly invisible. Its shadow will be cast on the planet trailing the moon as a black dot from 9:23 to 11:34 PM EDT. Io’s Transit will end at 10:19 PM. The ” means seconds of arc, or 1/3600th of a degree. Click or tap on the image to enlarge it. Created using Cartes du Ciel (Sky Charts).
The naked-eye planets and the Moon at sunset and sunrise on a single night, starting with sunset on the right on March 19, 2025. The night ends on the left with sunrise on the 20th. Click or tap on the image to enlarge it. Created using my LookingUp app and GIMP.
This is a low precision ephemeris of the Sun Moon and naked eye planet positions for today and tomorrow, March 19th and 20th, 2025. Some of the columns are self-explanatory, others not. The transit column is the time that the body crosses the meridian and is due south. Elong, for elongation, is the angle between the Sun and that body. RA is right ascension, which is the object’s east-west position on the celestial sphere in hours and minutes. Dec is declination which is the north-south position of the object on the celestial sphere in degrees and minutes. R is the distance of that object from the Sun in astronomical units. An astronomical unit is about 93 million miles or 150 million kilometers. And Delta is the distance of that object from the Earth, also in astronomical units. I omit the ‘m’ in am and pm for compactness. The data was generated using my LookingUp for DOS app and displayed as a table by my Ephemeris Helper app.
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