Today:
The Vernal or Spring Equinox marks the calendar arrival of Spring early this morning at 10:46 AM EDT, when the Sun is positioned directly above the Earth’s equator. Although the word equinox means “equal night”, the atmosphere bends the sun’s light, shifting it slightly higher, adding several minutes to the daylight.
Saturday:
Orion is an easy target, even on a moonlit night. Tonight, the lack of moonlight might give you an opportunity to see a fainter feature of our winter Giant. Look below his three belt stars, where a fainter line marks his sword. The very end of the sword is a little fuzzy, because it is not a star but a vast region of glowing gas and dust, called a nebula.
Sunday:
Spring brings a shortening of the nights that will continue until the Summer Solstice, on June 21st, making viewing less favorable for the evening winter constellations, such as Orion. This evening, Orion will appear a third of the way up in the southwest at 8:30, but in a month only a quarter of the way up, and starting to get bleached out by the ever later sunsets, and will get lost in the setting sun by early May.