Bakersfield Night Sky — March 21, 2026
Tickets for the April 9 showing of “Incoming!” and the April 23 showing of “Supervolcanoes” at the William M Thomas Planetarium are now available through the Vallitix site.
We are now officially in the season of spring with the start at the March equinox yesterday, though the weather seems to have jumped to summer!
Tomorrow night, March 22, the waxing crescent moon is about half a fist width at arm’s length to the lower right of the Pleiades star cluster at the shoulder of Taurus, the bull. You’ll see them midway up in the southwest sky after sunset. The moon will draw closer to the Pleiades as the night progresses, halving the sunset gap by the time they set shortly after 11 p.m. They will both easily fit within the same field of view of your binoculars by then.
Three days later (March 25), a half-lit “first quarter phase” moon will be near brilliant Jupiter in Gemini high in the southern sky at sunset, with Jupiter on the left and the moon on the right. The gap between them will be slightly larger than the separation of the two brightest stars of Gemini above them, Pollux and Castor. By the time the moon and Jupiter set at about 3 a.m., the gap between them will be smaller than what separates Pollux from Castor.
On March 29 a nearly full moon trails behind the blue-white hot star Regulus of Leo at the bottom end of the Sickle (what would be the lion’s chest). The moon will be full the evening of April 1 but there will be no lunar eclipse like we had earlier this month. Because the moon’s orbital plane is tipped by five degrees with respect to Earth’s orbit around the sun, the moon usually misses Earth’s shadow. Since Earth’s shadow points directly away from the light source (the sun), the only possible phase the moon could be in the shadow is a full phase but usually the moon is above or below the shadow at full phase. The next lunar eclipse visible from Bakersfield won’t be until 2029.
Tonight as civil twilight is ending at about 7:35 p.m. and brighter stars are beginning to appear, the brightest star, Sirius, of Canis Major will be almost exactly south. Orion will be in the southwest when the sky is dark enough to see his belt and all four stars at the corners of Orion (Betelgeuse, Bellatrix, Rigel, and Saiph). The constellations of spring, Leo, Virgo, and Bootes, are rising in the east.
Bootes has the second brightest star easily visible from Kern County, the orange-cool star Arcturus. Now, I know for painters and other artists, that “orange-cool” seems like an oxymoron but the color something has from its internal temperature goes in the opposite direction: red stars are relatively cool, orange and yellow stars are a bit warmer but still cooler than the sun, white and blue-white stars are hotter than the sun, and blue stars are the hottest stars. Recall the colors in a candle flame: the hottest part next to the wick is white or even blue while the cooler outer part of the flame is orange or red. Much cooler objects like planets, animals, plants, and humans glow in the colors beyond the deep red, the infrared. Really, really hot objects glow in the ultraviolet and in the case of thick gas hundreds of millions of degrees hot swirling into a neutron star or a black hole, the glow will be X-rays.
This color-temperature sequence works for solids, liquids, and dense gases. It does not work for very rarefied, super-thin, low-density gases like the gases near the top of our atmosphere, many tens of miles above the surface, where aurorae occur. Very rarefied gas and plasma colors depend on their composition—the structure of the atoms and molecules.
Arcturus is a relatively nearby giant star at just 37 light years away. Its temperature is 4290 K (compare to the sun’s 5840 K) and when you include the copious amounts of infrared it radiates, Arcturus emits 215 times as much energy as the sun and is 25 times larger in diameter than the sun, roughly a quarter the size of Mercury’s orbit. Near the end of its life, Arcturus is fusing helium to make carbon in its core instead of the usual hydrogen-to-form-helium fusion of most stars (including our sun).
In solar system news that coincides with the April 9 “Incoming!” show, a team of astronomers from around the world pooled together their observations of the near-Earth asteroid Didymos to find that its orbit around the sun was changed by the impact of a spacecraft into Didymos’ moonlet Dimorphos back in 2022 as a test of our planet protection capabilities. NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission slammed into the moonlet to test the kinetic interceptor method of deflecting asteroids from impacting Earth. The moonlet’s orbit around the larger asteroid was shortened by an easy-to-measure 32 minutes.
The more recent result shows that not only was the moonlet’s orbit changed but also the orbit of the binary asteroid around the sun was changed, though by a minuscule amount. The change was equivalent to distinguishing the width of a human hair ten miles away (or one part in 3 billion), so maybe the more amazing thing with this particular news item is the precision of the measurements!
I hope you’ll make it to one of the April shows at the Planetarium!
—
Director of the William M Thomas Planetarium at Bakersfield College
Author of the award-winning website www.astronomynotes.com
