For February, the Full Moon, the Hunger Moon, is February 5. The last quarter moon is February 13, and the waning crescent passes 4 degrees north of Mercury in the dawn on February 18. The New Moon is February 20.
The waxing crescent moon passes 2 degrees south of Venus in dusk on February 22, then passes 1.2 degrees south of Jupiter a few hours later. The moon first quarter moon passes one degree north of Mars on February 27.
Mercury is low in the southeast dawn sky in mid-February, with the waning crescent moon nearby on February 18. Venus climbs higher in the western sky, to dominate it as the evening star through the summer. Still on the far side of the Sun, Venus is currently a waning gibbous phase in the telescope. She overtook Saturn in late January, and now catches up with Jupiter as well as February ends, passing 1.3 degrees from it on February 28. These are the two brightest planets, so this will be a spectacular naked eye conjunction into early March as closer Venus moves eastward daily past slower moving Jupiter. Mars is near quadrature, 90 degrees east of the setting Sun, and high overhead at sunset in Taurus. Saturn is behind the sun and lost in its glare this month.
The UNISTELLAR app automatically saves the image and imaging data on your smartphone and to the Unistellar data base for future research. Note it identified the comet, date, exposure time, location (the StarLight Drive In, in this case). With this telescope, which is currently on sale for $2,000, you can image in color spectacular shots like this closeup of the comet’s greenish coma and yellowish dust tail, flowing up to the upper left here. This tail should grow longer and the comet brighten is it approaches the Earth and Sun in the next month.
While the naked eye, dark adapted by several minutes away from any bright lights, is a wonderful instrument to stare up into deep space, far beyond our own Milky Way, binoculars are better for spotting specific deep sky objects. This will be particularly true this month for watching this new comet. They need not be expensive; the 10x50 ones for $30 at WalMart Sporting goods compare well with ones costing much more.
For a detailed map of northern hemisphere skies, visit skymaps.com.
The constellation Cassiopeia makes a striking west in the northwest. She contains many nice star clusters for binocular users in her outer arm of our Milky Way, extending to the northeast now.
Cassiopeia’s daughter, Andromeda, starts with the northeast corner star of Pegasus’’ Square, and goes northeast with two more bright stars in a row. It is from the middle star, beta Andromeda, that we proceed about a quarter the way to the top star in the W of Cassiopeia, and look for a faint blur with the naked eye. M-31, the Andromeda Galaxy, is the most distant object visible with the naked eye, about 2.5 million light years away.
Overhead is Andromeda’s hero, Perseus. Between him and Cassiopeia is the fine Double Cluster, faintly visible with the naked eye and two fine binocular objects in the same field. Perseus contains the famed eclipsing binary star Algol, where the Arabs imagined the eye of the gorgon Medusa would lie. It fades to a third its normal brightness for six out of every 70 hours, as a larger but cooler orange giant covers about 80% of the smaller but hotter and thus brighter companion as seen from Earth.
At Perseus’ feet for the famed Pleiades cluster; they lie about 400 light years distant, and over 250 stars are members of this fine group. East of the seven sisters is the V of stars marking the face of Taurus the Bull, with bright orange Aldebaran as his eye; use it (mag. +0.9) as a comparison star to measure the fading of Betelguese. The V of stars is the Hyades cluster, older than the blue Pleiades, but about half their distance.
Yellow Capella, a giant star the same temperature and color as our much smaller Sun, dominates the overhead sky. It is part of the pentagon on stars making up Auriga, the Charioteer (think Ben Hur). Several nice binocular Messier open clusters are found in the winter milky way here. East of Auriga, the twins, Castor and Pollux highlight the Gemini; they were the first two recruits for the Argonauts of University of West Florida.
South of Gemini, Orion is the most familiar winter constellation, dominating the eastern sky at dusk. The reddishsupergiant Betelguese marks his eastern shoulder, while blue-white supergiant Rigel stands opposite on his west knee.Betelguese is also known as alpha Orionis, for it has been the brightest star in Orion most of the time. But for much for 2019, it faded due to an expulsion of condensing carbon dust (soot) blown off in our direction, and was only 1/3rd its greatest brightness. Now this cloud has dissipated.
Just south of the belt, hanging like a sword downward, is M-42, the Great Nebula of Orion, an outstanding binocular and telescopic stellar nursery. The bright diamond of four stars that light it up are the trapezium cluster, one of the finest sights in a telescope. Just east of Betelguese is the fine binocular cluster NGC 2244. But the much fainter Rosette Nebula that it lies in the center of requires bigger scopes or astrophotography.
In the east rise the hunter’s two faithful companions, Canis major and minor. Procyon is the bright star in the little dog, and rises before Sirius, the brightest star in the sky.
Sirius dominates the SE sky by 7 p.m. and as it rises, the turbulent winter air causes it to sparkle with shafts of spectral fire. Beautiful as the twinkling appears to the naked eye, for astronomers this means the image is blurry; only in space can we truly see “clearly now”. At 8 light years distance, Sirius is the closest star we can easily see with the naked eye from West Florida. For a sense of stellar distances, consider sunlight is eight minutes old by the time it warms your face. So the light from Sirius has taken the number of minutes in a year (eight minutes versus eight years), or 60 x 24 x 365.25 = 525,960 times; Sirius is more than a half million times distant than our Sun. While it is 21x more luminous than our Sun in reality, no wonder the Sun rules the day! And Sirius is the closest star you can easily see from here. Almost every thing you see in the night sky must be millions of times more distant from us than our home star.
When Sirius is highest, along our southern horizon look for the second brightest star, Canopus, getting just above the horizon and sparkling like an exquisite diamond as the turbulent winter air twists and turns this shaft of starlight, after a trip of about 200 years!
To the northeast, a reminder that spring is coming — look for the bowl of the Big Dipper to rise, with the top two stars, the pointers, giving you a line to find Polaris, the Pole Star. But if you take the pointers south, you are guided instead to the head of Leo the Lion rising in the east, looking much like the profile of the famed Sphinx.
We have set new dates for our public gazes at Big Lagoon State Park west of Pensacola for these Saturdays: February 11and 25.
We are also working with the Santa Rosa Island Authority for our Pensacola Beach Pavilion schedule in the Spring. For the first time in decades, our observing chairman, Dewey Barker, is not handling these events. He died of Leukemia on January 9, and his leadership in distributing star charts, pointing out constellations, answer kid’s questions, coordinating school, church, and civic gazes, and sharing his photographic and observation expertise will be sorely missed by the whole astronomical community. We commemorate his life and outreach by naming our new Unistellar eVscope eQuinox the “Deweyscope” and you will find it at many of our club gazes for years to come.
More on these plans next month! For more information on the Escambia Amateur Astronomers and our local star gazes for the public, visit our website at eaaa.net.
