Stargazing: Port Credit, Ontario

Current Weather Updated: Tuesday, March 16, 2010, 5:00 EDT - Pearson Airport

°C

Clear

Feels Like: -
Wind: N 9km/h
Sunrise: 7:29
Sunset: 19:26

Relative Humidity: 59%
Pressure: 101.94 kPa
Visibility: 24.0 km
Ceiling: unlimited

Clear Sky ForecastUpdated: Tuesday, March 16, 2010, 5:00 EDT

Moon Phases

Mar. 23

First Quarter

Mar. 29

Full Moon

Apr. 6

Last Quarter

Apr. 14

New Moon

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This Week in the Sky

Leo's Galactic Lair

Although the southeastern constellation Leo (the Lion) appears deceptively barren to those unequipped with a telescope, it harbors some of the best hunting grounds for far-off galaxies. These extragalactic (meaning outside of our own Milky Way galaxy) objects are best viewed through at least small to medium telescopes, but a few can be spotted with binoculars - even from suburban skies.

Lying just below the stellar triangle that forms the lion's rump is a pair of spiral galaxies that look like two fuzzy snowballs. Known as M65 and M66, these gigantic islands of stars are both around 30 million light years distant from Earth. Each galaxy is home to a few billions suns and are 180,000 light years apart.

Meanwhile Leo's underbelly has two more challenging binocular targets but these may need dark country locales to find. Lying left of Regulus are two distant spiral galaxies,-M95 and M96 - both 38 million lights away. The Hubble Space Telescope used stars within M95 to help pin down the expansion rate of the universe.

- Andrew Fazekas