February 2026 begins with the Full Moon, the Snow Moon, on February 1. The last quarter moon is on February 9. The new moon, an annular eclipse visible only in Antarctica, is on February 17. The waxing crescent moon passes 5 degrees north of Saturn in the SW evening sky on February 19. The moon is first quarter on February 24. The waxing gibbous moon passes 4 degrees north of Jupiter on February 27.
Mercury is visible in the dusk at midmonth, with the greatest eastern elongation of 18 degrees following the sunset on February 19th. Venus and Mercury have a close meeting, with Mercury five degrees north of much brighter Venus, on February 26. Venus has at last returned to the evening sky, passing superior conjunction behind the Sun in January, but it is still low in the SW dusk right after sunset. It will climb higher, farther east of the Sun, in the next several months to dominate the evening skies. Mars remains lost in the Sun’s glare this month, but will return to the dawn sky by March.
Both Jupiter and Saturn are easily visible now in the evening. Jupiter came to opposition in Gemini last month, and is very bright in the NE evening sky after sunset now. Any small telescope will reveal its four large moons. Here they are on New Year’s Eve, photographed by EAAA president Ed Magowan with his C-8. Note the prominent belts and zones that cross its disk, and also how its fast rotation (10 hours) has flattened its poles and causes its equator to bulge. The changing appearance of the moons, with periods from 2 days for Io, to 16 days for Callisto, makes for changes in their alignments by the hour!
Saturn is in Aquarius, low in the SW at sunset, and will be lost in the Sun’s glare by March, so catch a last glimpse of the rings, now almost edge-on in a 200X telescope. By the time they reappear in the dawn in May, the 27 degree axial tilt of Saturn will make them appear notably more open, and this opening will continue for the next six years, until they are tilted 27 degrees toward the Sun by 2032.
For a detailed map of northern hemisphere skies visit the www.skymaps.comwebsite and download the map for February.
The constellation Cassiopeia makes a striking W in the NW. She contains many nice star clusters for binocular users in her 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.
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 it is twice as close as it is.
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 the University of West Florida.
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 west 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. The bright diamond of four stars that lights it up is the trapezium cluster, one of the finest sights in a telescope.
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 that 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 from 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."
The Pensacola State College Planetarium presents the Pink Floyd show, ”Dark Side of the Moon,” at 6 p.m. on Friday, February 6. Get your tickets on Purple Pass soon. The last several shows have been sold out!
You are welcome to attend EAAA meetings in room 1709 at Pensacola State College at 7 p.m. on February 27, March 27, May 1, May 29, and June 26. We have set new dates for our public gazes at Big Lagoon State Park west of Pensacola for these Saturdays: 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 for the public, visit our website. Join us on Facebook.
