Special to CosmicTribune.com, February 16, 2025

Excerpts from weekly Sky&Telescope report.

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 16

■ The waning gibbous Moon rises around 10 p.m. tonight, with Spica following it up just 2° or 3° below it (for North America). The Moon will draw closer to Spica through the night, to pass only about 1° under it around dawn on the 17th. As indicated below.

Spica will not actually hang on its edge for North Americans. However, the Moon will actually occult Spica for parts of the South Pacific and southern South America.

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 17

■ After dinnertime Sirius the Dog Star blazes in the southeast, the brightest star of Canis Major. Look below Orion.

In a dark sky where lots of stars are visible, the constellation’s points can be connected to form a convincing dog seen in profile. He’s currently standing on his hind legs, facing right. Sirius shines on his chest like a bright dogtag, to the right or lower right of his faint triangular head.

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 18

■ A fast-creeping red dwarf. Have you ever seen a red dwarf star? These are the most common stars in space, but they’re so intrinsically dim that not one of them is among the 6,000 pinpoints visible to the naked eye on even the darkest nights. One of the nearest and brightest red dwarfs lies just 3° west of Procyon, nicely placed these winter evenings. It’s Luyten’s Star, also known as GJ 273, and at visual magnitude 9.9 it’s in range of small telescopes. Use the finder charts with Bob King’s article Catch Luyten’s Star.

This humble object is very close to us as stars go, only 12.3 light-years away, so it is also a high proper motion star; it creeps across its celestial backdrop by 3.7 arcseconds per year. This means that a careful visual telescope user might detect its motion in as little as about 3 years, writes King, “depending on its proximity to field stars and the making and breaking of distinctive alignments with other stars.” He suggests, “Make an initial observation, note the position in a sketch, map or photo, and then return a couple years later. Hey, no hurry.”

To locate and identify Luyten’s Star with King’s charts you’ll need to be good at telescopic star-hopping. This is an essential skill for any amateur astronomer to develop so you don’t get lost in space. See How to Use a Star Chart with a Telescope, and expect a certain amount of frustration at first. Everyone goes through this. Don’t give up.

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 19

■ Certain deep-sky objects hold secret surprises within or near them. During evening now in this dark of the Moon, get out your telescope and sky atlas for a go at Bob King’s eight Hidden Gems in Common Deep-Sky Objects now in view.

■ Algol should be at its minimum light, magnitude 3.4 instead of its usual 2.1, for a couple hours centered on 8:52 p.m. EST. It takes several hours to rebrighten. Comparison-star chart, with north up. (Celestial north is always the direction in the sky toward Polaris. Outside at night, turn the chart around to match.)

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 20

■ This is a fine week to look for the zodiacal light if you live in the mid-northern latitudes, now that the early-evening sky is moonless and the ecliptic tilts high upward from the western horizon at nightfall. From a clear dark site with clean air, look west at the end of twilight for a dim but huge, tall pyramid of pearly light. It’s tilted to the left, aligned along the constellations of the zodiac.

What you’re seeing is sunlit interplanetary dust, originating from old asteroid collisions and long-evaporated comets, orbiting the Sun near the ecliptic plane.

■ Last-quarter Moon (exactly so at 12:33 p.m. today). The Moon will rise around 2 a.m. tonight, with orange Antares just a degree or two above it. By the beginning of Friday’s dawn they’ll be hanging beautifully in the south, a little farther apart.

Now it becomes Antares’s turn to hang out with the waning Moon before and during dawn.

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 21

■ After dinnertime at this time of year, five carnivore constellations are rising upright in a row from the northeast to south. They’re all presented in profile with their noses pointed up and their feet (if any) to the right. These are Ursa Major the Big Bear in the northeast (with the Big Dipper as its brightest part), Leo the Lion in the east, Hydra the Sea Serpent in the southeast, Canis Minor the Little Dog higher in the south-southeast, and bright Canis Major the Big Dog in the south.

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 22

■ Sirius blazes high in the south on the meridian by about 8 or 9 p.m. now. Using binoculars or a scope at low power, examine the spot 4° south of Sirius (directly below it when on the meridian). Four degrees is somewhat less than the width of a typical binocular’s or finderscope’s field of view. Can you see a dim little patch of speckly gray haze there? That’s the open star cluster M41, about 2,300 light-years away. Its total magnitude adds up to 5.0.

Sirius, by comparison, is only 8.6 light-years away — and being so near to us, it shines some 400 times brighter than that entire cluster.

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 23

■ Have you ever seen Canopus, the second-brightest star after Sirius? It lies almost due south of Sirius, by 36°. That’s far enough south that it never appears above your horizon unless you’re below latitude 37° N (southern Virginia, southern Missouri, central California). And near there, you’ll need a very flat south horizon. Canopus crosses the south point on the horizon just 21 minutes before Sirius does.

So, when to look? Canopus is due south when Beta Canis Majoris — Murzim the Announcer, the 2nd-magnitude star about three finger-widths to the right of Sirius — is at its highest due south over your landscape. That’s about 8 p.m. now, depending on how far east or west you are in your time zone. Drop straight down from Murzim then.

  Feb. 16-23: Overlooked winter highlights, The Sky