Oklahomans can watch the night sky this April for meteors, 'micromoon': Here's when to look
Stargazers in Oklahoma this month will be able to observe a meteor shower, a clustering of planets and a phenomenon known as a "micromoon."
The annual Lyrids meteor shower will appear in April after this month's "pink" full moon. Later this month, the crescent moon will be visible near Venus, Saturn and Mercury.
The only full moon visible in April will occur on Sunday, April 13.
You might also see it referred to as the "Pink moon," a term used by the Old Farmer's Almanac and based on traditional indigenous practices, to describe moon phases during the month of April.
Like other nicknames attributed to moon, it has nothing to do with how the moon looks in the night sky. Instead, the Old Farmer's Almanac notes the appearance of creeping phlox, or "moss pink" is more prevalent in certain areas of North America during this time of year.
The side of the moon facing Earth will be obscured by shadow later this month on April 27.
This phase is called a "new moon" and resets the monthly waxing-waning cycle that's visible from Earth.
A new moon gives stargazers and astronomers a better chance to observe the night sky because of the lack of light reflected off the moon's surface.
The Lyrids meteor shower will peak on the night of Monday, April 21, according to The Planetary Society.
The Lyrids are a medium-strength meteor shower and is best seen from the northern hemisphere during the month of April. While the strongest show will happen on April 21, meteors can also be spotted on the nights before and after that date.
The meteors will appear to originate near the Lyra constellation, which rises in the northeast sky after dark. Unfortunately, half the moon's surface will be reflecting sunlight that night, which will affect how well the meteors can be seen after it rises in the early morning hours.
The term micromoon refers to the appearance of the full moon when it is the furthest away from Earth.
The moon's orbit is not perfect, and its distance from Earth varies by about 30,000 miles. This causes the moon to be observably smaller when it's farther away, but not by much.
According to NASA, a micromoon appears about 14% smaller and nearly one-third dimmer than its opposite, the supermoon, which describes the full moon when it's closest to Earth.
As the new moon phase approaches on April 24 and 25, a cluster of brightly reflective planets will appear nearby before sunrise.
Venus, Saturn and Mercury will gather low in the east at dawn on those days, along with the waning crescent moon.
To spot Mercury, which will lag further behind the pack, you'll need to have a clear, unobstructed view of the horizon.
This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: April full moon, Lyrids meteor shower visible from Oklahoma this month
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
New York Post
an hour ago
- New York Post
Astronomers baffled by mystery object flashing signals at Earth every 44 minutes: ‘Like nothing we've ever seen'
The truth is out there. Astronomers say they're stunned by an unidentified object flashing strange signals from deep space. The object, named ASKAP J1832-0911, was detected by the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) and NASA'S Chandra X-ray observatory — the world's most powerful X-ray telescope. 'It is unlike anything we have seen before,' Andy Wang, an astronomer at Curtin University in Perth, Australia, declared in a statement published this week. ASKAP J1832-0911 emits pulses of radio waves and X-rays for two minutes every 44 minutes, according to the experts, who documented their findings in Nature journal. An image of the sky showing the region around ASKAP J1832-0911. Ziteng Wang, ICRAR ASKAP J1832-0911 has been classified as a 'long-period transient' or 'LPT' — a cosmic body that emits radio pulses separated by a few minutes or a few hours. Wang and has team theorize that the object could be a dead star, but they don't know why it 'switches on' and 'switches off' at 'long, regular and unusual intervals,' reports. 'ASKAP J1831-0911 could be a magnetar (the core of a dead star with powerful magnetic fields), or it could be a pair of stars in a binary system where one of the two is a highly magnetised white dwarf (a low-mass star at the end of its evolution),' Wang wrote. 'However, even those theories do not fully explain what we are observing,' he added. 'This discovery could indicate a new type of physics or new models of stellar evolution.' Wang and his team hope to detect similar another using radio waves and the Chandra X-ray observatory, saying a subsequent discovery will help them learn more about the nature of such LPTs. An artist's illustration of NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory in space. NASA/CXC & J. Vaughan, NASA/CXC & J. Vaughan It's not the only space discovery to hit headlines and spark conversation in recent weeks. Earlier this month, Cambridge University Press revealed that astronomers had detected a signal extracted from interstellar noise that could be a sign of active biology on another planet. 'Astronomers have detected the most promising signs yet of a possible biosignature outside the solar system, although they remain cautious,' a press release from the prestigious publisher read.
The Verge
an hour ago
- The Verge
SpaceX rockets keep exploding. Is that normal?
With yet another failed Starship test this week, in which the ambitious heavy rocket exploded once again, you might reasonably suspect that luck has finally run out for SpaceX. But this degree of failure during a development process isn't actually unusual, according to Wendy Whitman Cobb, a space policy expert with the School of Advanced Air and Space Studies, especially when you're testing new space technology as complex as a large rocket. However, the Starship tests are meaningfully different from the slow, steady pace of development that we've come to expect from the space sector. 'The reason a lot of people perceive this to be unusual is that this is not the typical way that we have historically tested rockets,' Whitman Cobb says. Historically speaking, space agencies like NASA or legacy aerospace companies like United Launch Alliance (ULA) have taken their time with rocket development and have not tested until they were confident in a successful outcome. That's still the case today with major NASA projects like the development of the Space Launch System (SLS), which has now dragged on for over a decade. 'They will take as long as they need to to make sure that the rocket is going to work and that a launch is going to be successful,' Whitman Cobb says. 'This is not the typical way that we have historically tested rockets.' SpaceX has chosen a different path, in which it tests, fails, and iterates frequently. That process has been at the heart of its success, allowing the company to make developments like the reusable Falcon 9 rocket at a rapid pace. However, it also means frequent and very public failures, which have generated complaints about environmental damage in the local area around the launch site and have caused the company to butt heads with regulatory agencies. There are also significant concerns about the political ties of CEO Elon Musk to the Trump administration and his undemocratic influence over federal regulation of SpaceX's work. Even within the context of SpaceX's move-fast-and-break-things approach, though, the development of the Starship has appeared chaotic. Compared to the development of the Falcon 9 rocket, which had plenty of failures but a generally clear forward path from failing often to failing less and less as time went on, Starship has a much more spotty record. Previous development was more incremental, first demonstrating that the rocket was sound before moving onto more complex issues like reusability of the booster or first stage. The company didn't even attempt to save the booster of a Falcon 9 and reuse it until several years into testing. Starship isn't like that. 'They are trying to do everything at once with Starship,' Whitman Cobb says, as the company is trying to debut an entirely new rocket with new engines and make it reusable all at once. 'It really is a very difficult engineering challenge.' 'They are trying to do everything at once with Starship.' The Raptor engines that power the Starship are a particularly tough engineering nut to crack, as there are a lot of them — 33 per Starship, all clustered together — and they need to be able to perform the tricky feat of reigniting in space. The relighting of engines has been successful on some of the previous Starship test flights, but it has also been a point of failure. Why, then, is SpaceX pushing for so much, so fast? It's because Musk is laser-focused on getting to Mars. And while it would theoretically be possible to send a mission to Mars using existing rockets like the Falcon 9, the sheer volume of equipment, supplies, and people needed for a Mars mission has a very large mass. To make Mars missions even remotely affordable, you need to be able to move a lot of mass in one launch — hence the need for a much larger rocket like the Starship or NASA's SLS. NASA has previously been hedging its bets by developing its own heavy launch rocket as well as supporting the development of Starship. But with recent funding cuts, it's looking more and more likely that the SLS will get axed — leaving SpaceX as the only player in town to facilitate NASA's Mars plans. But there's still an awful lot of work to do to get Starship to a place where serious plans for crewed missions can even be made. 'There's no way that they're putting people on that right now.' Will a Starship test to Mars happen by 2026, with a crewed test to follow as soon as 2028, as Musk said this week he's aiming for? 'I think it's completely delusional,' Whitman Cobb says, pointing out that SpaceX has not appeared to be seriously considering issues like adding life support to the Starship or making concrete plans for Mars habitats, launch and landing pads, or infrastructure. 'I don't see SpaceX as putting its money where its mouth is,' Whitman Cobb says. 'If they do make the launch window next year, it's going to be uncrewed. There's no way that they're putting people on that right now. And I seriously doubt whether they will make it.' That doesn't mean Starship will never make it to Mars, of course. 'I believe SpaceX will engineer their way out of it. I believe their engineering is good enough that they will make Starship work,' Whitman Cobb says. But getting an uncrewed rocket to Mars within the next decade is a lot more realistic than next year. Putting people on the rocket, though, is another matter entirely. 'If they're looking to build a large-scale human settlement? That's decades,' Whitman Cobb says. 'I don't know that I will live to see that.' Featured Videos From The Verge Microsoft Build event in 15 minutes Microsoft just wrapped its annual Build conference for 2025. The focus this year: AI agents. We got a look at the open agentic web, new CoPilot updates, Linux is now open-source, and the company also confirmed it's expanding its Azure AI Foundry models list to include Elon Musk's Grok 3 and Grok 3 mini from xAI. Plus, we hear from OpenAI's Sam Altman and Nvidia's Jensen Huang. Here's everything you missed
Yahoo
4 hours ago
- Yahoo
Black Astronaut Made Space History in 1995. Now He's Getting Inducted into Hall of Fame (Exclusive)
Dr. Bernard Harris Jr. is being inducted into NASA's Astronaut Hall of Fame on Friday, May 31 He made history in 1995, becoming the first Black astronaut to perform a spacewalk "To be part of the foundation for what we're doing in space now is really fulfilling," he tells PEOPLEDr. Bernard Harris Jr. grew up in Texas as NASA was developing and always had an interest in science – but once he watched man land on the moon, even at 13, he began to have astronaut dreams. 'I knew what I wanted to do,' he tells PEOPLE. 'I wanted to follow the footsteps of these great men, human beings, that had done something for the very first time in human history.' That's exactly what he did. Now Harris — who became the first Black person to perform a spacewalk and recently released his second book, Embracing Infinite Possibilities — will be inducted into the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame on Saturday, May 31. Before going to college at the University of Houston, Harris, now 68, tells PEOPLE he realized he wanted to become a doctor so he could practice medicine on Earth – and in space. Following his residency in internal medicine at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, Harris pursued a fellowship in endocrinology because he was 'advised to find the most critical aspect of humans in space that needed to be solved' — and one of those is bone loss. (Astronauts lose 1% of bone per month in space, he says.) By 1990, Harris applied and spent a year of astronaut basic training. About three weeks later, he was assigned to his first mission: the STS-55 on Space Shuttle Columbia in 1993. During that trip, Harris says he did the first medical examination in space and even the first intravenous line. 'It was only natural for me to say, 'Okay, if we're going to be in space for long periods of time, how do we ensure that humans can survive up there?' " he recalls. For his second mission, STS-63 on Space Shuttle Discovery in 1995, Harris completed his historic spacewalk. That mission was also notable because Eileen Collins made history as the first female space commander. 'To be part of the foundation for what we're doing in space now is really fulfilling,' he says, adding that he loves to see younger astronauts taking over – and having longer stays in space. Speaking of those longer stays, although the International Space Station wasn't built during his career as an astronaut, some of the devices that crews use today were originally developed in his laboratory. After his two space missions — which included logging 438 hours and traveling over 7.2 million miles — he ventured into philanthropy with the launch of his nonprofit, which supports youth programs in math and science education and crime prevention. Then it was time to go after his dream of becoming an entrepreneur – and his work has always been a bit ahead of the curve. As CEO and managing partner of Vesalius Ventures, Harris focused on telemedicine before many even knew how that would work and was previously hired by Spacehab (now the Astrotech Corporation), one of the first commercial private space companies. 'That was way ahead of SpaceX and Blue Origin, and what we're doing now," he adds. As for the future of space tourism and where he believes the space program is headed, Harris says he continues to be excited that there are more avenues to get to space. 'There'll be tremendous opportunities on the moon. And I think that when we then take that bigger leap to go to Mars,' he believes. He ultimately sees the continued progress as a way to unify. 'When I was out on my spacewalk," he says, 'looking back at the earth, [I realized] how important this spaceship that we live on planet Earth is to us all. From that distance, you can't see the divisions that divide us here on earth. And my hope is that space will be an opportunity for us to come together as a people." Embracing Infinite Possibilities is out now. You can purchase it here. Read the original article on People
