made almanac for April

Launched COELIX APEX on John Starbird and took screen snaps.

Let's all settle down after the media hullabaloo about a big planetary alignment...

Here's the graph for April only. For my home but applicable to much of south-western Ontario.

I did not create or add a legend.

The planets are shown with lines in the following colours:

• grey - Mercury
• white - Venus
• orange - Mars
• yellow - Jupiter
• green - Saturn
• aquamarine - Uranus
• dark blue - Neptune

Other:

• light blue - midnight

And here's the list of notable events.

A few additional observations:

• after the maximum elongation in the west, speedy Mercury appears in the dawn sky at the end of April
• Venus blazes high up in the west
  
• Mars, early in the month, is a late-night target but draws close to midnight by the end of April
• mid-month Jupiter transitions to the morning 
  
• Saturn emerges in the morning
• Neptune is low in the dawn sky all month
  

And finally, we're in the steep part of the hourglass. The nights are getting shortly, rapidly!

There you have it. 

...

Later, I pulled the "phenomena" report. Each entry starts with date.

• 11 - close encounter between Venus and the Pleiades (2.6°)
• 22 - meteor shower, Lyrids (18 meteors/hour at zenith; duration = 9.0 days), near the new Moon phase!
• 26 - close encounter between the Moon and Mars (2.6°)
• 30 - comet C/2021 Y1 ATLAS at its perihelion (dist. to the Sun = 2.033 AU; magn. = 12.1)

Now I've got a decent list of events for April...