Young Moon joins Venus and Jupiter

This image generated by Stellarium shows the situation from the UK, looking West, as it will be on Sunday March 25th 2012 at approximately 7:15 pm. The Moon will be a thin crescent of about 9%. Keen observers will have noticed that Venus and Jupiter have moved further apart since their beautiful conjuction last week, however this will still be a lovely event to see.

If you click on this image to see it a full size, you can see that Venus is not far below the Pleiades, or Seven Sisters which is a lovely, bright, open star cluster in Taurus. Orion, The Hunter, is just off to the East. Also notice the line on the image; This is the Ecliptic which marks the apparent path that the Sun follows through the sky over the course of the year. The planets can also be found close to the Ecliptic plane and this explains why they are also seen in the Zodiacal constellations (but don’t mention the 13th constellation of the Zodiac – Ophiuchus (The Serpent Bearer) as it upsets the astrologers!)