Tonight's Sky: March

Produced by the Space Telescope Science Institute’s Office of Public Outreach in collaboration with NASA’s Universe of Learning partners: Caltech/IPAC, Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Sonoma State University

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Text, March. Tonight's Sky. Constellations. Stylized drawings of a lion, a ram, and a bull. West, 11 PM. Looking up into a night sky filled with stars. 

A constellation forming the body of a man with one arm outstretched holding a shield and the other stretched up holding a club. Three bright stars in a row form the man's belt. Text, As winter turns into spring the sky transitions as well with new starry sights to see. Orion. A drawing of a helmeted man raising his club and shield appears over the constellation. Text, Orion with his shining belt still dominates the evening sky. Just past Orion's raised arm lies the constellation Gemini, also known as the Twins. Two stick figures with joined hands. Text, In Greek mythology, the Twins accompanied Jason and the Argonauts on their expedition in search of the golden fleece. A drawing of two muscular twin men appears over the constellation, one holding a club and the other holding a three-pronged whip. Text, The brightest stars in Gemini mark the heads of the twins, Castor and Pollux. Pollux is a yellowish giant swelling as it enters old age, and hosts a Jupiter-sized planet. Castor is a system of three pairs of stars bound in an intricate gravitational dance. 

At the feet of the Gemini brothers is a fuzzy patch that binoculars or a small telescope show to be a cluster of several hundred stars called M35. Ground-based view, an image of loosely clustered stars in white, yellow and blue hues. 

Neighboring Gemini is the faint constellation of Cancer. A constellation forming an X-like shape connected by a horizontal line in the middle. A drawing of a crab appears over the constellation. Text, Within the body of Cancer lies M44, the beehive cluster, one of the nearest star clusters to Earth. Ground-based view. An image of a faintly glowing cluster of stars. Text, this swarm of stars looks like a cloudy patch to the naked eye, but ground-based telescopes show a pleasing scatter of roughly 1,000 stars. 

A constellation made of a long snaking line of stars with a circle at one end. Text, adjacent to cancer lurks the head of the Hydra, the water snake, the longest constellation in the sky. A drawing of a fanged and coiled snake appears over the constellation. It traces across the night sky, ending far away from the head. 

Text, distant galaxies like NGC 3923 reside along the snake's coils. The tail of the snake appears over the constellation near NGC 3923. Zoom in on NGC 3923, an image of a distant galaxy glowing with diffused white light .Text, Hubble Space Telescope visible light. While NGC 3923 appears as a faint smudge in backyard telescopes, more powerful observatories reveal it to be a giant oblong elliptical galaxy with an interesting ripple pattern. Elliptical galaxies consist of billions of old stars with very little gas to make more. They can grow larger by ingesting smaller galaxies, forming concentric shells of stars as seen in this image from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. 

Near the end of Hydra's tail lies M83, a closer galaxy with a spiral shape. Zoom in on M83, an image of a cloudy swirl of pink and yellow studded with small blue and larger reddish stars around a central bright point. Darker brown branches swirl through the clouds. Text, Hubble Space Telescope visible and ultraviolet light. The whorl of M83 blossoms in this Hubble image. Also known as the Southern Pinwheel, the galaxy is a swirl of dark dust lanes, blue star clusters and glowing pink star-forming clouds. A deep red image of the same galaxy with a yellow center point and black patches. Text, Chandra X-ray Observatory X-ray light. An X-ray image reveals details that no human eye could ever see on its own. Searing hot gases tracing the spiral arms, black holes, and neutron stars emitting X-rays as they gobble up companions, and a core of concentrated black holes and neutron stars, the product of recent star formation. 

Enjoy the stars, galaxies, and mythical figures of March from your own backyard. The whole Hydra spanning across the sky. Text, Celestial wonders await you in Tonight's Sky.