This is Ephemeris for Wednesday, March 18th. Today the Sun will be up for 12 hours and 3 minutes, setting at 7:52, and it will rise tomorrow at 7:47. The Moon is new today, and won’t be visible.
Let’s take our weekly look at the whereabouts of the naked-eye planets. By 8:30 PM or about a half hour or so after sunset, Venus may be seen very low in the West. Binoculars or a telescope will show a very tiny disc on Venus, because it is pretty much behind the Sun, a good way from us. However over the next 7 months it will be moving closer to us and becoming much larger. Jupiter is the brilliant star-like object more than halfway up in the southern sky at 9 PM. It’s the brightest object in the sky at that point. It has resumed its normal eastward motion, spending most of its evening appearance making up the ground it lost in its 4 months of retrograde motion. The planet and its moons are a treat for binoculars or a telescope.
The astronomical event times given in this blog are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan (Lat 44.7° N, Long 85.7° W; EST, UT – 5 hours) unless stated otherwise. Times will be different for other locations.
Addendum
Venus is seen low in the western sky at 8:30 PM tonight March 18, 2026, or 38 minutes after sunset. Created using Stellarium.
Jupiter is seen with the bright winter stars in the south at 9:00 PM tonight, March 18, 2026. Also showing are the zodiacal constellations of Taurus, Gemini, Cancer and Leo. Created using Stellarium.
Telescopic Jupiter and Venus (north up) as they would be seen in a small telescope with the same magnification. Venus will be visible for a short time near the western horizon, while Jupiter is visible mopst of the night. Venus’ apparent diameter will be 10.4″, and be 95.7% illuminated. It’s on the far side of the Sun, 1.6 times the Sun’s distance from us. Jupiter will be 40.5″ in diameter, with its moons shown here for 9 PM, tonight March 18th, 2026. The moons can shift noticably over an hour. . The (”) symbol means seconds of arc, or 1/3600th of a degree. Created using Cartes du Ciel (Sky Charts), LibreOffice Draw and GIMP.
The naked-eye planets and the Moon at sunset and sunrise on a single night, starting with sunset on the right on March 18th, 2026. The night ends on the left with sunrise on the 19th. 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 18th and 19th, 2026. Some of the columns are self-explanatory, others are 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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