April 2025 Stargazing Guide
Greetings junior scientists, scientists and citizens of this great big weird, wild and wonderful world in which we live. As always, I'm your humble science communicator the great Orbax. Coming to you from the Department of Physics here at the University of Guelph and I'd like to welcome you to our April 2025 Star Gazing Guide.
Welcome in to our first full month of spring. We've left our winter nights behind us as the days just keep getting longer here in Guelph with sunrise moving back from 7:02 a.m. on April 1st to 6:15 a.m. local time on April 30th. And sunset going from 7:48 p.m. on the 1st to 8:22 p.m. on the 30th. That means by month's end we'll only have about 10 hours of dark skies, so how do we make the most of it? This month we're on the lookout for a pair of lions, take a peek at a galactic mystery and try to spot a meteor or two.
All this and more when you just take some time... to look up.
Two of our best constellations this month are Leo and Leo Minor.
Both are visible all night long appearing a little east of south at sunset and heading towards west just before dawn.
Leo is not only a zodiacal constellation, not only our 12th largest constellation, but is conceptually one of our oldest constellations.
The Mesopotamians recognized a similar constellation as early as 4,000 BCE.
Leo contains two very bright stars which should be easy to spot Denebola and the even more luminous Regulus. And while Regulus appears to be a single star it's actually a quadruple star system comprised of two pairs of stars.
Leo Minor appears directly above Leo. It is smaller and dimmer than Leo which makes it harder to spot but it contains a deep sky object that I knew we had to talk about as soon as I read about it.
That's right we're talking about Hanny's Voorwerp!
Back in 2007 at the age of 23 a young woman named Henny van Arkel discovered a mystery that was aptly named Henny's Voorwerp, which is Dutch for Hanny's object.
At the time of its discovery it was considered an unidentified astronomical object and remained a mystery for a very long time.
Nowadays the Voorwerp is thought to be a quasar ionization echo. Basically a region of gas that was illuminated by a short-lived black hole generated quasar. It's complicated, but Hanny discovered this as a volunteer for the Galaxy Zoo Project!
She was categorizing images of galaxies when she found the Voorwerp. It's an incredible inspiring story, I mean she didn't even have a telescope at the time! I'll leave some links in the description below to check out but it just goes to show you that it's all out there just waiting for you junior scientists.
After this winter's prolonged planetary parade our view of our fellow orbiting astronomical bodies has changed for spring.
Venus will be shining bright and early in our eastern sky rising about 70 minutes before sunrise this month. Following Venus, Saturn and Mercury will be dim and difficult to spot.
Our evening views will also dim as the month goes on with Mars, the Planet of Robots, high in the southwest and Jupiter lower in the west at sunset.
Our full moon this month takes place on April 12th and is yet another micro-moon appearing slightly smaller than the regular Full Moon due to its placement in the moon's elliptical orbit.
Spring and the April Moon mark the return of the geese which led to the Cree referring to this Moon as Niskipisim, “the Goose Moon”.
The Mi’kmaw refer to the April Moon as Penatmuiku’s, the Birds Laying Eggs Time moon, while the Ojibwe of the Great Lakes region are still enjoying the Maple harvest with Iskigamizige-giizis, the “Maple Sap Boiling Moon”.
We also see plants beginning to bloom with the Cherokee Nation calling the April Moon the Flower Moon and European settlers calling it the Pink Moon referring to the phlox flowers that bloom first during spring in the eastern forests and not the color of the Moon.
From April 15th to the 29th the Earth will make its annual passage through the dust particles left by comet C/1861 G1 Thatcher .This dust burns up in our atmosphere and we're lucky enough to witness it as the Lyrid's Meteor Shower!
The Lyrids are named after their radiant, the region of sky from which they appear to originate, which is near Vega. A bright star in the constellation of Lyra the Lyre.
The Lyrids peak on the night of April 21st into the morning of the 22nd with up to 15 meteors per hour.
Even though the radiant is Lyra, meteors can be visible anywhere in the sky. Try to catch them in the nice dark sky before midnight and in the early morning before the crescent moon rises at 3:30 a.m.
Good luck junior scientists!
Well here we go. The weather's getting a little nicer and while we may have some rainy days now and then I like to think of those clouds as a reminder that not just something, but everything, lies beyond that veil that separates us from infinity. The beauty of the unknown and the glory of the cosmos that's all just out there, waiting for you ,if you just take some time...
to look up.
See you next month junior scientists and don't forget to have a science-tastic day!
Special thanks to Royal City Science's own planetary geochemist Dr Glynis Perrett for her help preparing our Star Gazing Guide and the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada