[V]
APRIL
In the early evening hours of April the western sky is still adorned with the brilliant jewels with which we became familiar on the clear frosty evenings of winter. Orion is now sinking fast to his rest beneath the western horizon. Beautiful, golden Capella in Auriga glows in the northwest. Sirius sparkles and scintillates, a magnificent diamond of the sky, just above the southwestern horizon, while Procyon in Canis Minor, The Lesser Dog, and Castor and Pollux, The Twins, in the constellation of Gemini, are still high in the western part of the heavens.
In the northeast and east may be seen the constellations that will be close to the meridian at this time next month. Ursa Major, The Greater Bear, with its familiar Big Dipper, is now in a favorable position for observation. The Sickle in Leo is high in the eastern sky, and Spica, the brilliant white diamond of the evening skies of spring, is low in the southeast in Virgo.
Near the meridian this month we find between Auriga and Ursa Major, and east of Gemini, the inconspicuous constellation of Lynx, which contains not a single bright star and is a modern constellation devised simply to fill the otherwise vacant space in circumpolar regions between Ursa Major and Auriga.
April—Cancer
Just south of the zenith at this time, and lying between Gemini and Leo, is Cancer, The Crab, the most inconspicuous of all the zodiacal constellations. There are no bright stars in this group, and there is also nothing distinctive about the grouping of its faint stars, though we can readily find it, from its position between the two neighboring constellations of Gemini and Leo by reference to the chart.
In the position indicated there we will see on clear evenings a faint, nebulous cloud of light, which is known as Praesepe, The Beehive, or as The Manger, the two faint stars flanking it on either side being called Aselli, The Asses. This faint cloud can be easily resolved by an opera-glass into a coarse cluster of stars that lie just beyond the range of the unaided human vision.