The last quarter moon is on January 10, and new moon is on January 18. The waxing crescent moon is just above Saturn on January 23, and the moon is at first quarter on January 29. On the 30, it again passes Jupiter, but this time north of it.
Mercury, Venus, and Mars are all on the far side of the Sun in January and invisible. They will return to the dawn sky in February. But this will be a fine month for Jupiter; it is at opposition on January 9, rising in the northeast at sunset, and closest to Earth. EAAA member Marc Glover captured it and two moons on the morning of September 27, 2025. For scale, its Great Red Spot could swallow up the Earth, and Io and Europa are comparable to our own moon in size. The bigger outer moons, Ganymede and Callisto, are bigger than the planet Mercury.
Any small scope will show these four large “Galilean” moons, the first great astronomical discovery in 1609. When his daily observations showed that all four orbited Jupiter, the Earth was not the center of all motion, as most ancients had assumed. Their revolutions range from two days for innermost Io to two weeks for Callisto, so the patterns change in hours! The cloud patterns on the oblate disk (flattened by its rapid 10-hour rotation) also change fast.
Saturn is in the southwest at sunset, and its rings are still almost edge-on. They will open up during the next six years, due to their 27-degree axial tilt (more than our 23.5 degrees) and double the planet's brightness in the sky by 2032. It will be lost in the Sun’s glare by February, so catch both the gas gains now in the evening sky.
Visit www.skymaps.com and download the map for January 2026; it will have a more extensive calendar, and a list of best objects for the naked eyes, binoculars, and scopes on the back of the map.
The constellation Cassiopeia makes a striking W in the NW. Her daughter, Andromeda, starts with the northeast corner star of Pegasus’ Square, and goes northeast with two more bright stars in a row. From the middle star, beta Andromeda, go about a quarter of the way to the top of the west of Cassiopeia, and see a faint blur with the naked eye. M-31, the Andromeda Galaxy, is the most distant object visible with the naked eye, lying about 2.5 million light-years distant.
Overhead, Andromeda’s hero, Perseus, rises. 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.
Look 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 closer.
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. UWF alumni can associate the pair with Jason and the Golden Fleece legend, for they were the first two Argonauts to sign up on his crew. Jupiter at opposition makes a triangle with Castor and Pollux in the northeast evening sky after sunset.
South of Gemini, Orion is the most familiar winter constellation, dominating the eastern sky at dusk. The reddish supergiant Betelguese marks his eastern shoulder, while blue-white supergiant Rigel stands opposite on his western knee. 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. It is part of a huge spiral arm gas cloud, with active star birth all over the place. You should be able to glimpse this stellar birthplace as a faint blur with just your naked eyes, and the larger your binoculars or telescope, the better the view becomes. The four stars in a diamond in the center, the Trapezium, are among the hottest, most massive, and luminous stars known.
Last but certainly not least, 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 minutes 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. Below Sirius in binoculars is another fine open cluster, M-41, a fitting dessert for New Year’s sky feast.
The Pensacola State College Planetarium presents “From the Earth to the Universe” at 6 p.m. on Friday, January 9. Get your tickets on Purple Pass soon. The last several shows have been sold out! Our EAAA January meeting follows at 7 p.m. in room 1709 with a tour of the huge observatories in Chile, which I had a chance to visit last October.
We have set new dates for our public gazes at Big Lagoon State Park west of Pensacola for these Saturdays: January 10 and 24, February 7 and 21, and March 14 and 28. We are also returning to Pensacola Beach this spring with the Santa Rosa Island Authority for our Pensacola Beach Pavilion schedule. For more information on the Escambia Amateur Astronomers and our local star gazes for the public, visit our website. Email our sponsor, Lauren Rogers at Pensacola State College at lrogers@pensacolastate.edu, and join us on Facebook.
