Most accurate on April 21 at 9:30 PM.
Click thumbnail for full-size image
edited to add: if you cannot see the full-size image
please read the first comment at the end of this article
“Where are this month’s maps for finding Comet Holmes?” I was asked. It seems that people are still interested in this amazing comet. Well, as the maps above show, the part of the sky with the comet, which contains all of those constellations with bright stars that give the winter sky its chilly glitter, are drifting down into the evening sunset. So, as the twilight fades that part of the sky is already low in the west, and as darkness increases, those stars set. At each dusk, that part of the sky is lower down.
In the coming month there are two prominent planets visible: Mars is near Pollux in Gemini, and Saturn is just east of Regulus in Leo. The Lyrid meteor shower will happen on April 22 — but the full moon will make them hard to observe.
Those of us around the Salish Sea anticipate some dramatic high and low tides around May 6 at the time of the new moon, which this time coincides with the Moon at its perigee (closest point to the Earth in its orbit - 357,771 km away).
Technorati Tags: Comet Holmes, star map
If you are having a problem seeing the full-size images of the maps in this article, I would like to know about it.
On my computer, I can see the thumbnail images, but when I click on them for the full-size picture, I receive a #403 “Forbidden” error message. Asking the image to reload does not help either. What does work is placing my cursor at the end of the image’s URL in the navigation tool bar and hitting return.
Both the thumbnail and the full-size image are stored, not here on WordPress, but at Webshots. The people at Webshots claim that they cannot reproduce the problem.