There is a new moon on the 3rd April, first quarter on 11th, full moon on the 18th and last quarter on the 25th.

It is best to observe the moon around the dates of first and last quarter when it’s not too bright and there is plenty to see. On the 7th April, low in the north west, the crescent moon is near the Pleiades, one of the most beautiful objects in the night sky. The Pleiades are part of the constellation of Taurus.

The moon passes below the star Regulus in the constellation of Leo on the night of 13th April, the planet Saturn on the 16th and the star Spica in the constellation of Virgo on the 17th. On the 21st April the moon will be near the bright star Antares in the constellation of Scorpius.

• Download a starmap – click here
• Shropshire Astronomical Society website

Just before dawn on the 30th the thin crescent moon can be seen above the planet Venus.

Venus can be found low down in the dawn sky just before sunrise in the east. The only planet on view in the night sky this month is the ringed planet Saturn, but it shines brilliantly all night long in the constellation of Virgo.

On the 3rd April the ringed planet, Saturn, is at opposition when it is at its closest to Earth, yet the planet is still 1290 million kilometres away. Through a telescope the rings will appear much brighter at the beginning of April, around the time of opposition, than towards the end of the month; the complex ring system consists of icy particles together with rock debris and dust that reflect light from the Sun. Saturn has more than 60 moons including Titan the second largest moon in the solar system after Jupiter’s Ganymede. The Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn discovered lakes of liquid methane and ethane on Titan and captured images of salt-water plumes rising from another of the planet’s moons, the icy Enceladus. Saturn is the second largest planet in the solar system, nine times the radius of Earth but it is the least dense, consisting in large part of hydrogen and helium. Saturn could be named ‘dizzy world’ as it has a prodigious rate of spin rotating in 10 hours 32minutes, it also has atmospheric wind speeds of up to 1800km per hour and lightning flashes 1000 times more powerful than those on Earth.

The constellations of Leo and Virgo dominate the April night sky. Leo looks like a resting lion with a sickle-shaped group of stars forming the head. Leo was associated with the legends of Hercules, he strangled the Nemean lion as one of his twelve labours. Virgo commemorates Astraea, the Greek goddess of justice. The best that can be said of this shape of this constellation is that it looks like a ‘Y’ in the sky. For those who like imaging deep-sky objects there are a host of galaxies within Virgo forming the Virgo Cluster, about 2000 of them that are at the centre of our local supercluster.

The maximum of the Lyrid meteor shower occurs on the night of 22/23 April, these appear to radiate from the constellation of Lyra. This meteor shower results from debris left behind by Comet Thatcher and are best observed after 2am when the Moon has set.

Ron Iremonger