April 5
The Nameless White
Sun Position
The Sun is in Aries near +8° declination. Northern hemisphere afternoons carry genuine warmth; in the southern hemisphere, mornings are crisp and astronomical twilight is shortening.
Sky Highlight
The Virgo Cluster transits well this week. April also gives northern observers the best annual elevation of Coma Berenices, the faint star cluster that marks the hair of Berenice, a scattered group of about 40 stars about 280 light-years away, impressive in large binoculars and stunning in a wide-field telescope.
Deep Sky Object
M53 (NGC 5024), globular cluster in Coma Berenices, about 58,000 light-years. M53 is one of the more distant globular clusters still visible in a small telescope, appearing as a tight, slightly elliptical glow; a much less concentrated companion cluster, NGC 5053, lies just a degree away. Visible from both hemispheres.
Featured Star
Heze (ζ Vir) is a white A3V main-sequence star 74.1 light-years away, steady and unremarkable in the best sense, a star burning through its hydrogen at a calm pace, its Arabic name's etymology now genuinely lost. It sits in the middle of Virgo's figure, one of several fainter stars that give the constellation its form without commanding attention.
Around This Date
- April 5, 2010NASA's Space Shuttle Discovery launched on mission STS-131, delivering supplies to the International Space Station.
- April 3, 2014The European Space Agency's Gaia mission released its first test image, previewing the billion-star astrometric survey that would transform knowledge of stellar distances.
Heze's name has been spoken for centuries and its meaning forgotten; the star itself keeps shining, indifferent to etymology.