Bakersfield Night Sky — April 18, 2026
Tickets for the last show of the spring season at the William M Thomas Planetarium, “Supervolcanoes” this Thursday, April 23 are still available through the Vallitix site.
The crew of the Artemis II mission to the moon made it back to Earth safely in a textbook splashdown a week ago. The crew represented the great things that can happen when this nation listens to its better angels and pushes the boundaries towards a greater good. On the science end of things, we did a detailed monitoring of astronaut health in deep space beyond Earth’s magnetic shield (changes to their immune system and radiation exposure). We gained a better understanding of the moon’s geological history from their human eye observations to pick up the nuances in shapes, textures, and colors that would reveal the geology story. The mission was timed so that some of the far side would be lit by the sun. They looped around the moon on April 6, when the moon was in a waning gibbous phase for us here on Earth. The astronauts also looked for flashes from meteoroid impacts on the far side of the moon and “lunar horizon glow” from small charged dust particles elevated by static electricity.
As they looped around the moon, their path took them well beyond the previous record of farthest travel from Earth by humans set by Apollo 13 and the crew expressed the hope that their record wouldn’t last as long as the 55-year record of the Apollo 13 mission. Next up will be Artemis III next year to test the landers from Blue Origin and Space X. That testing will be done in low-Earth orbit. Artemis IV will hopefully land people near the lunar south pole in 2028.
The lunar poles are thought to harbor frozen water in the permanently shadowed crater floors. That water would be consumed by thirsty astronauts and processed for fuel. However, new results from the Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter’s “ShadowCam” supplied by NASA shows that at most 20% of the surface material in those crater floors is water. That is not enough to sustain a moon colony. Future robotic missions will drill down into the crater floors to provide more definitive measurements of the water abundance.
Yesterday was the beginning of the lunar phase cycle with the New Moon, so tonight you might be able to catch a very thin sliver of a waxing crescent low in the west shortly after sunset. Brilliant Venus will be to the moon’s upper left, about a couple of knuckles width at arm’s length separation between the two. You might be able to use the moon to then locate Venus in broad daylight, since Venus is bright enough to see in daylight IF you know where to look. On April 19, the waxing crescent moon will be to the left of the Pleiades in Taurus. On April 22, a much fatter crescent moon will be in between bright Jupiter and the brightest star in Gemini, Pollux. In the early evening, you’ll see the moon move into exact alignment with Jupiter and Pollux and then move well out of alignment by the time they set a bit after 1 a.m.
The early morning of April 22 and the evening of that day will be the peak of the Lyrid meteor shower. The Lyrids form as Earth plows through the dust trail left behind by Comet Thatcher (C/1861 G1) which has an orbital period of 415 years (next venture into the inner solar system won’t be until 2283). The dust particles hit the upper atmosphere at 49 kilometers/sec (=109,610 miles per hour). The meteors appear to radiate from a point near the boundary between Lyra and Hercules.
On April 23, Venus will be near the Pleiades. They’ll be close enough to easily fit within the field of view of your binoculars. While you’re checking out that sight, see if you can spot Uranus to the lower left of Venus, less than a pinky width at arm’s length separation.
Far beyond our galaxy, astronomers have found what appears to be two supermassive black holes (each over 1 billion solar masses) circling each other every 121 days at the center of Markarian 501, about 500 million light years away. If the discovery is confirmed, it would be the first proof of the final phase of galactic mergers. The favorite idea of making supermassive black holes has been through many small galaxies, each with their own proportionally smaller black hole centers, colliding into each other in the early more crowded universe, to make larger galaxies and their black hole nuclei merging to make the proportionally larger supermassive black holes. We have plenty of evidence for galaxy collisions but not the black hole merger piece until now.
As material spirals into a supermassive black hole, a jet of material will shoot out at the poles. One jet is pointed right at us to make a “blazer” that we’ve tracked for decades. A second supermassive black hole’s presence has been deduced from the discovery of a second jet pointed in a different direction. The second jet varies in brightness in a periodic fashion over 121 days as one would expect if the second monster black hole orbits the first black hole we already know about. The black holes are close enough to each other that they could merge in less than a century, making a fantastic gravitational wave signal when they do so!
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Director of the William M Thomas Planetarium at Bakersfield College
Author of the award-winning website www.astronomynotes.com
