If you like eclipses (and can we agree that eclipses are fabulous?), then late March and early April are shaped-up for fun. Here in Nederland, we’ll have a near-total eclipse of the moon on the night of March 24-25. Coincidentally, this year’s Paschal Moon is on Palm Sunday night. Two weeks later, the sun will be eclipsed.

How it shakes out: A few times a year, the earth happens to cross in front of the moon’s view of the sun. As the earth shadows the moon, Selene’s face turns bloody orange-red.

(That coloring used to scare the bejabbers out of people, until John Kepler explained 400 years ago that the bloodiness was just the sun’s light diffracting around the earth’s rim, in an orange sunset all around the earth’s disc. Another imaginary dragon, slain by a scientist. If you want to know more, attend my Backyard Astronomy talks next time around.)

Lunar and solar eclipses usually pair up, 14.77 days apart. (Again, attend my Backyard Astronomy talks.) This paired solar eclipse lands on April 8.

Lunar eclipses are visible to everybody on one whole side of the earth; they’re a dime a dozen. Total solar eclipses, in contrast, are little black dots projected onto the earth’s surface, moving at over twice an airliner’s speed, with restricted partial-visibility zones on either side. Whereas the March 24-25 lunar eclipse will be visible throughout this hemisphere, the April 8 solar eclipse will only be visible in parts of North America.

To see the sun completely covered (called totality), you must be somewhere inside the 100-mile-wide yellow zone of this column’s map. The closer you are to the central red line, the longer totality lasts.

Totality is awesome, emphasis on “awe.” For a few minutes, everything goes pitch-dark; the air abruptly chills; the stars and planets shine at mid-day; and the sun’s white-hot corona arcs into space around the blacked-out disc. A breathtaking reality, not a flat screen.

Nederland will see this eclipse as partial. At the maximum just after noon, the sun will be two-thirds covered. Worth viewing, and as a bonus, sunspots are currently plentiful.

Safe-watching rules are at: https:// science.nasa.gov/eclipses/safety/. You can wreck your vision if you don’t follow those instructions. Welding goggles and other improvised viewers are not safe! They might seem dark enough, but they pass non-visible, eye-damaging radiation. Galileo viewed sunspots with smoked glass. He cooked his retinas with invisible rays and later went blind. Don’t pull a Galileo!

When will Nederlanders see a TOTAL solar eclipse? Mid-morning of August 12, 2045 (when I’ll be at 84 years), a total solar-eclipse shadow will skim across Grand Junction, continuing eastward between Colorado Springs and Pueblo. The totality zone’s northern edge will touch Nederland’s outskirts at 10:38 a.m. MDT.

With any luck, we’ll see each other for that one.

In March Skies: The sun begins the month in Aquarius, entering Pisces March 11. Equinox: daytime and nighttime are equal at 12 hours on March 19. Days lengthen and nights shorten at their fastest rate this month, the maximal rate of daylight growth being on the equinox itself.

Daylight Saving Time (DST), setting our clocks forward an hour, begins at 2 a.m. on Sunday, March 10.

The moon’s dates are: Last Quarter March 3; New March 10 (Ramadan beginning at first-crescent sighting, evening of March 10 or 11); First Quarter March 17; Full March 25 (Worm Moon, also this year’s Paschal Moon).

March Meteor Showers: The Gamma Normids, a weak shower, peak on March 14 between 4 a.m. to sunrise.

Best Sky Viewing Nights (Minimal Moon): March 4-16. Sunset (Mid-Month): Brilliant Capella is overhead. Orion is due south, with Sirius and Canis Major at south-southeast. Leo is rising due east. The Twins, Castor and Pollux, are very high in the east. The Great Square of Pegasus is low in the west.

Midnight (Mid-Month): Vega rises in the northeast with the Big Dipper high in the north. Follow the Dipper’s arm as you Arc to Arcturus, in Bootes, then continue onward until you hit bright-white Spica in Virgo. The twin stars Zubeneschemali and Zubenelgenubi, in Libra, rise in the southeast. The trapezoid of Corvus is high in the south. Pretty, reddish Alphard (One Who Stands Alone) is indeed alone, in the southern sky.

Sunrise (Mid-Month): Bright red Altair, in Aquila (the Eagle) is high in the southeast, forming the Navigator’s Triangle with Deneb to its left and Vega practically overhead. Scorpius with burning-red Antares is due south.

Mercury is high in the west at sunset at the end of the month. See it from Barker Reservoir in the post-sunsets of March 25 through April 2; March 29 is the best geometry.

Venus is pretty much lost in the sun, just before sunrise.

Mars rises just ahead of Venus, about an hour before the sun.

Jupiter, in the Ram and closing in on Uranus, is low in the west at sunset, setting by 11 p.m. MDT. Watch its March 13 close approach to the thin crescent moon.

Saturn is in the sun.

Notable Space Missions: A geosynchronous-orbiting Orion-class radio-signals intelligence satellite will launch from Cape Canaveral on a Delta-IV Heavy booster is scheduled to launch from Cape Canaveral this month.

Frank Sanders, a spectrum scientist at the U.S. Department of Commerce in Boulder, takes astronomy-related inquiries at backyardastronomy1@gmail.com.