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Mars is getting brighter. By mid-2018, Mars will be at its brightest since 2003, when it was closer and brighter in our sky than in some 60,000 years.

In 2018, April 22 is the peak morning. The moon, near the 1st quarter phase, is out of the way. Expect 10 to 20 meteors per hour at the peak.

You don’t need to find the radiant to see the meteors. But it’s fun to spot, near the bright star Vega.

How do astronomers determine masses for distant space objects? Here’s one example – using the moon’s orbit as a baseline to find the mass of our sun – from EarthSky’s Bruce McClure.

Venus blazes away in the west at evening twilight. Jupiter rises at mid-to-late evening and shines brightly before dawn. After the Mars and Saturn conjunction on April 2, the pair can be seen all month before dawn, near one another.

The March 31 Blue Moon is the 2nd Blue Moon of 2018. We haven’t had 2 Blue Moons in a year since 1999 and won’t again until 2037.

Happy equinox! The March 20, 2018, equinox is an event that happens on our sky’s dome and a seasonal marker in Earth’s orbit around the sun.

Equinox means “equal night.” And you might hear day and night are equal at the equinoxes. Yet Earth’s air and our sun conspire to give us more daylight at an equinox.

When a camera captures a star’s movement across the sky, it’s called a star trail. An astrophotographer explains how he does it.