Cross your fingers for clear skies this coming Friday night (March 3rd) because we are having another of our hugely popular “Moon Watch” nights at the Brewery Arts Centre!
As I write this the weather forecast isn’t very good, but as we all know they can change overnight, or just be plain wrong, so let’s just wait and see what happens. If you can see the Moon at or after 6.30pm on Friday night come down to the Brewery, where we’ll have our telescopes set out in the garden.
And what will you see? Well, the Moon will be just short of First Quarter, which is the very best time to look at it through a telescope (not Full Moon, as everyone seems to think) because that’s when the Moon’s jagged mountains and deep craters stand out from the surface most clearly.
On Friday night we’ll have a spectacular view of some of the Moon’s most famous features – weather permitting!
If you come good and early, before Venus drops behind the trees, we should also be able to show you the “Evening Star” through our telescopes – which is now looking like a beautiful thin crescent through telescopes – and the planets Mars and Uranus too, although they’ll just look like tiny stars.
Unfortunately the Space Station won’t be putting in an appearance during our MoonWatch, it’s not an evening object at the moment, but we should see a few other satellites drifting across the sky while we’re Moon-gazing.
The event is free, begins at 6.30pm, and will end around 9pm.