The Nighttime Sky for March-May, 2023:

The Planets:
Venus is the dominant planet in the evening spring months this year shining brilliantly in the western evening sky. Jupiter is slowly sinking toward the horizon and will be lost in the solar glare by the end of March. Mars is now just a dull ruddy red object high in the SW evening skies and continues to dwindle in magnitude as its distance from us gets further away. Mercury will make a brief appearance in the western evening twilight by the end of March into early April. Saturn will be slowly rising earlier in the morning hours as a dull yellow object. You will need a telescope to see its rings.

Click on any Picture for Full View and More Information
Venus	Mars	Jupiter	Saturn
All Pictures Taken in My Heavenly Backyard with my Telescopes

The Heavens
Springtime is sometimes known as "Galaxy Season" as there are many of them visible through small telescopes. Some of the more outstanding ones are M81 and M82 (Bode's Galaxy and the Cigar Galaxy), M51 (The Whirlpool Galaxy), the "Trio in Leo", the great Northern Pinwheel Galaxy (M101), M63, also known as the Sunflower Galaxy, and M64, the Black-eye galaxy. Not too far from the Pinwheel galaxy in Ursa Major (The Big Dipper) is a spiral galaxy about 83 million light-years away called Messier 109, which contain about a trillion stars …(Our own Milky Way galaxy contains about 200 billion stars). Along with the galaxies, there are still plenty of nebulae to view including the Orion, Horsehead, and Rosette nebulae. These are all high in the southern sky at sunset in March but will fade into the evening twilight through the month of April. Coming into view are the Ring, Trifid, Lagoon, Omega and Eagle . Several globular clusters are in view including the beautiful Messier 3 and Messier 53 rising in the ENE shortly after sunset. There are so many objects awaiting for us to view in a sky near you. (All the pictures were taken in my 'Heavenly Backyard'.)

Click on any Picture for Full View and More Information
Messier 3	Trifid Nebula	Whilpool Galaxy	Ring Nebula
Sunflower Galaxy	Cigar Galaxy	Bode's Galaxy	Trio in Leo
All Pictures Taken in My Heavenly Backyard with my Telescopes

Want to see more? ... Go to my Heavely Backyard Astronomy page: I will continue to add more images of the nighttime sky from my backyard and post on my astronomy page, My home page of Savannahpat.name and my Weather and Nature Facebook page along with any videos on my My You Tube Page ... All these pictures taken in my 'Heavenly' backyard.