Planets Moving Through the Sky

Our solar system’s two inner worlds put on a good show in our western skies during this month’s evening hours. The primary showpiece is Venus, which shines brilliantly in our west for up to two hours after the end of dusk. Closer to the horizon—and quite a bit dimmer but still quite bright and conspicuous—is Mercury, which is at its highest a few days before midmonth. Within a few days, however, Mercury starts a rapid descent toward the horizon and is lost in twilight by the last few days of April.

Also visible in our evening sky this month is the red planet, Mars, which continues to fade as it keeps pulling away from Earth following their relatively close approach to each other late last year. Mars is high in the western sky as darkness falls and sets about two hours after midnight. Meanwhile, over in our morning sky, Saturn rises up to an hour before dawn and gradually climbs higher into our eastern sky during the coming months.

April’s one semi-decent meteor shower is the Lyrid shower, which this year peaks the morning of Sunday, April 23. Normally,

Lyrids only produce about 15 to 20 meteors an hour, but on rare occasions—most recently 41 years ago—have produced much stronger displays.

A rare hybrid solar eclipse takes place Thursday, April 20. During this event, the moon is at such a distance from Earth that it is in total eclipse near the center of the path and annular (not large enough to cover the sun completely and thus leaving a thin ring, or annulus, around it) toward either end of the path. This month’s eclipse takes place mainly over open waters of the eastern Indian and southern Pacific oceans, with the only landfall taking place over Australia’s Northwest Cape and parts of the islands of Timor and New Guinea in Indonesia. These locations will experience slightly more than one minute of totality.

While New Mexico misses out on this eclipse, we get both of the next two solar eclipses. An annular eclipse October 14 passes directly across New Mexico from northwest to southeast, and a total eclipse crosses east-central Texas on April 8, 2024. New Mexico will see a relatively deep partial eclipse from that event.