For February 2025, the waxing crescent moon is two degrees to the lower left of Venus, now near its greatest brightness. This would be a good evening to catch them together before sunset, easily visible in daylight by 4 p.m. in the southwest. The first quarter moon sits five degrees north of Jupiter at sunset, almost directly overhead at sunset for us. On February 9, the waxing gibbous moon makes a neat triangle with bright red Mars and Pollux in the Gemini. Farther north in Greenland, observers can see an occultation, which of course hopefully many of you observed last month on January 13. The Full Moon, the Hunger Moon, rises at sunset on February 12. The last quarter moon rises at midnight on February 20. The new moon is February 27.
Mercury is lost in the Sun’s glare this month. Venus dominates the western sky but starts overtaking us and retrograding this month. She appears as a bright crescent, growing larger in size but less lit this month in small telescopes. Mars is at its best. It was closest to us in January, but now well up in the NE at sunset and will reveal its North Polar Cap and some dark lava flows on its deserts with larger scopes, high power, and good seeing. Jupiter is also perfect for observing, almost overhead at sunset, and its four large moons and Great Red Spot are visible in telescopes. But Saturn, its rings almost closed edge-on, is lost in the glare of the Sun all month. When it emerges again in the dawn next month, we will be seeing the dark underside of the rings for the rest of 2025, and most scopes will only show the disk of the giant planet.
For a detailed map of northern hemisphere skies, visit Skymaps.com.
The constellation Cassiopeia makes a striking W in the NW. She contains many nice star clusters for binocular users in the outer arm of our Milky Way, extending to the NE now.
Cassiopeia’s daughter, Andromeda, starts with the NE corner star of Pegasus’ Square and goes NE 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 to 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 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. The V of stars is the Hyades cluster, older than the blue Pleiades, but about half their distance. Aldebaran is not a member of this cluster, and twice as close as it is.
Look closely at this Valentine’s Rose for you. The red of the petals is colored by ionized hydrogen or an H II region. H I is just optically invisible neutral hydrogen, which can be mapped with radio telescope at 21 cm wavelength. 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, and is the same red color some of you remember from last April 8th during totality as the bright red prominences extending over the limb of the totally eclipsed sun! The energy to ionize this gas comes from the hot young B-class stars, just born in the center. Such 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 James’ shot. As Carl Sagan noted, we are made of such star stuff, ashes of stars!
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. Bottom of Form
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 everything 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. The bright star at the Lion’s heart is Regulus, the “regal star”. Fitting for our cosmic king of beasts, whose rising at the end of this month means March indeed will be coming in “like a lion”.
We have set new dates for our public gazes at Big Lagoon State Park west of Pensacola for these Saturdays: February 8 and 22 and March 8 and 22. Be sure to check in at the gate before sunset. You are welcome to attend EAAA meetings in room 1709 at Pensacola State College at 7 PM on these Fridays; February 14, March 14, April 25, May 23, June 20, and July 18. We return to the Pensacola Beach Pavilion of our stargazes on the Beach on April 4.
The Space and Science Theatre of Pensacola State College revives the popular “Dark Side of the Moon” planetarium show by Pink Floyd at 6 PM on Friday, February 7. Get tickets (the last eight shows have been sold out…great job. Allison!) at Purple Pass linking to Pensacola State College Planetarium.
For more information on the Escambia Amateur Astronomers and our local star gazes for the public, click here or contact our sponsor, astronomy teacher Lauren Rogers at Pensacola State College by e-mail at lrogers@pensacolastate.edu. Join us on Facebook, Contact the writer and Facebook administrator, Dr. Wayne Wooten at (850) 281-9334, or email johnwaynewooten@gmail.com. Keep looking up.
