In the morning sky, the waning crescent passes five degrees south of Venus on February 7, then four degrees south of Mars on February 8. The new moon is on February 9. Only months until the big total solar eclipse of April 8 runs through Middle America. If you still need solar eclipse viewers, contact me at johnwaynewooten@gmail.com.
Back in the evening sky, the waxing crescent moon passes two degrees below Saturn in the southwest twilight on February 10. On the 15th, the almost first quarter moon passes e degrees north of Jupiter overhead. The full moon, the Hunger Moon, rises at sunset on February 24.
Mars moves farther away from the Sun in the dawn sky throughout the month but remains on the other side of the Sun. An interesting advantage of this current position is that the rover cameras on Mars’ surface can image sunspots on the far side of the Sun, pointed away from us, and give us a week’s advance notice that a gibe one is coming soon over the Sun’s eastern limb as seen from earth.
Jupiter rides high overhead in Aries in the sunset sky, and its moons are easy to spot with small telescopes. But Saturn is soon gone, low in the southwest as the month begins, and lost in the sun’s glare by the end of the month.
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 Simmons 10x50 ones for $30 at WalMart Sporting Goods perform well.
For a detailed map of northern hemisphere skies, visit Skymaps.com and download the map for February.
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. M-31, the Andromeda Galaxy, is the most distant object visible to the naked eye, about 2.5 million light years away.
Overhead is Andromeda’s hero, Perseus. 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 of 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 with 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. East of Auriga, the twins, Castor and Pollux highlight the Gemini; they were the first two recruits for the Argonauts of the University of West Florida.
South of Gemini, Orion is the most familiar winter constellation, dominating the eastern sky at dusk. The reddish supergiant Betelgeuse marks his eastern shoulder, while the blue-white supergiant Rigel stands opposite on his west knee. Betelgeuse is also known as alpha Orionis, for it has been the brightest star in Orion most of the time. But for much of 2019, it faded due to an expulsion of condensing carbon dust (soot) blown off in our direction and was only one-third of its greatest brightness. Now this cloud has dissipated.
Look closely at my Valentine’s Rose for you. The red of the petals is colored by ionized hydrogen or an H II region. “II” indicates the hydrogen atom is hot enough to ionize, with its single electron kicked up to higher energy orbitals. The particular red color is the emission line created by the electron falling from the third to the second excited state. The energy to ionize this gas comes from the hot young B-class stars, just born in the center. So these clusters are forming from the inside out, with the expanding gases also rolling up the dark tendrils of carbon dust you see well at the top of my shot. This is as Carl Sagan said so well, “us” stuff, the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, calcium, iron, sulfur, and phosphorus created in supernovae and making our planet and bodies.
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 southeast 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 eight 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. And the CLOSEST star you can easily see from here.
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.
We have set new dates for our public gazes at Big Lagoon State Park west of Pensacola for these Saturdays: February 17, and March 2 and 16. Be sure to check in at the gate before sunset. You are welcome to attend EAAA meetings in room 1704 at Pensacola State College at 7 p.m. on these Fridays; February 23, March 15, April 26, May 24, June 21, and July 19. We take a summer break in August.
We are also working with the Santa Rosa Island Authority for our Pensacola Beach Pavilion schedule in the Spring. More on these plans next month! For more information on the Escambia Amateur Astronomers and our local star gazes for the public, call our sponsor, astronomy teacher Lauren Rogers at Pensacola State College by e-mail at lrogers@pensacolastate.edu. And join us onFacebook.
