For February 2023, the Full Moon, the Hunger Moon, is February 5th. The last quarter moon is February 13th, and the waning crescent passes 4 degrees north of Mercury in the dawn on February 18th. The New Moon is February 20th. Six more new moons find the moon passing in front of the Sun for an annular solar eclipse on October 14th; we will witness about 70% of the Sun hidden behind the moon at noon in our area. 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 27th. Remember at the end of January, the Moon actually occulted Mars from 11:32 on January 30th until 12:13 on January 31st, so don’t miss this event before February starts! These times are for Pensacola, and will vary by location, so check with your local astronomers and weather men on this.
Mercury is low in the SE dawn sky in mid February, with the waning crescent moon nearby on February 18th. 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 28th. 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.
Another member of our solar system will draw considerable attention this month. It is Comet 2022 E3 (ZTF). It was the third comet found in the first two weeks of March 2022, hence letter E (each half month starts a new letter, from A for Jan 1-15) and was discovered in a routine sky survey by the 48" Palomar Schmidt Telescope, now used by the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), looking for changes in the sky such as appearance and motion of comets, novae, supernovae, NEO asteroids, etc. It will pass closest to Earth, at 43 million km, on February 2nd, and probably become faintly visible with the naked eyes under dark skies. It is in the dawn sky in Corona Borealis in mid January, but will rapidly head northwest, passing between the Big and Little Dippers in late January, and into the evening sky overhead during all of February, passing closest to red planet Mars about Valentine’s Day.
Here we start in the northern sky on February 1st and follow the comet swiftly southward (note how fast it is moving passing us in early February here, passing between bright yellow Capella and Marfik in Perseus on February 5th, almost overhead, and then by red Mars on Valentine’s Day. Also note as it retreats from earth and Sun by month’s end, it fades rapidly and appears to slow down as it retreats from the Sun’s gravity.
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. 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 reddish supergiant 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. 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".
