02 Mar Wild Skies Shetland March Skies 2025

2025 March Skies from Shetland

Planets

There’s a good deal of planetary action to be had in March. With a little awareness of the changing positions, you’ll soon be able to identify Mars, Venus and Jupiter, given a clear stretch of night sky.

The next step is to get hold of a pair of binoculars and look at each planet again. You’ll quickly realise that its essential to have the binoculars on a mount or tripod, or at least resting on a wall!  With a pair of 8x40s you’ll have a roughly 8º wide field of view (think: 140m wide object at 1km distance). This will be enough to discern some colour and perhaps the hint of a planetary disc.

 

Looking west at 6pm on the 1^st of March, you have a very thin crescent moon along with an easily found Venus and more difficult to see, Mercury. If you are using binoculars, be sure to wait until the Sun has dropped below the horizon before searching for Mercury.  I used the desktop version of Stellarium to generate these charts for you; I highly recommend you use it too (e.g. stellarium-web.org).

 

The Moon will be a very thin crescent at this time, but will look nice in binoculars. Don’t bother trying to find Saturn, it sets too quickly now.

Still on the first of March, if you allow your gaze to track leftwards and upwards, near the V-shape of Taurus you will find Jupiter and then ruddy-red Mars  sitting in the middle of Gemini.

As the days march through March, you’ll notice that Venus gets closer to the Sun and thus more difficult to spot. You’ll need to delay going out too: by the 17^th probably until around 7:30pm. Mars and Jupiter will still be around!

Hidden by virtue of good manners or perhaps just a lack of brightness is Uranus. If you want to try to see it you will need 1. patience, 2. binoculars/telescope, 3. pad of paper, 4. time.  In this wide view below, you can see Jupiter, Hyades (in Taurus) and the Pleiades (Seven Sisters). Uranus lies to the bottom right here. 

To be sure you’ve seen it, sketch the star field shown below (this is roughly what you’ll see in 8x40s) then go back sometime around a week later and sketch it again, or compare what you see to your original sketch. Uranus will have wandered towards the star HIP 16077 a little bit.

A last comment on planets, I have to mention, if you do have a telescope, it’s very worthwhile to observer Jupiter. The disc shape is obvious as are the Galilean moons. Sketch them, note the time. Sketch them again a few hours later.

Total Lunar Eclipse

This major event occurs on the night 13-14^th March (that is to say overnight Friday 14^th into Saturday 15^th in the morning).  It begins at 3:57 GMT

https://www.timeanddate.com/eclipse/lunar/2025-march-14

The weather may not co-operate, but if it is clear, we’ll see a good portion of it, including totality.  The Moon will go blood-red as it passes deep into Earth’s shadow in space, but will set in the west before coming out of eclipse again.  Here’s the timetable from timeanddate.com.  You don’t need any special equipment to view this, although it can be fun to photograph it. If you can mount your camera and create a timelapse, that will create a good effect.