Star watching is wonderful this month. In fact, this is one of the best times of the year.
It's especially fantastic to see the starry dome away from the city lights in the countryside. Maybe you already live out there, and if you do, can I move in with you for a while?
Even if you have to put up with urban lighting like I do, you can still see a lot of bright stars and constellations, especially in the southern half of the sky. The constellation Orion the Hunter and the gang of bright constellations surrounding him are the main celestial event.
There's Orion himself, surrounded by his cast of characters like Taurus the Bull; Auriga, the retired Chariot Driver turned goat farmer, and Canis Major, the Big Dog. At the nose of the Big Dog is Sirius, the brightest star we see in the entire night sky any time of the year, shining brightly more than 50 trillion miles or about 8.5 light years away.
You would think that with the logjam of bright stars and constellations in our winter sky we would be facing toward the center of our Milky Way Galaxy. Actually, we're looking toward the edge of our galaxy, where there happens to be one of the brighter arms of our Milky Way.
Without a doubt, the stars of summer, especially late summer, are wonderful, but nowhere near as dazzling as the winter constellations, and there are no mosquitoes in the winter.
Orion and his gang have a visitor this winter that's even brighter than they are, and that's the planet Jupiter. The largest planet in our solar system is bursting with brilliance in the high southeastern evening skies nestled in the constellation Gemini the Twins.
It's one of the best targets out there for even a small telescope. If you received a telescope for Christmas and you haven't yet braved the cold winter nights with it, seeing Jupiter and its moons will make it worthwhile.
One of the most important things to do to make sure your telescope performs its best is to set it up outside with all of the eyepieces a good half hour to an hour before you use it. The lenses and/or mirror need to acclimate to the colder outside temperatures, otherwise you could experience blurred images.
When it's time to train your scope on Jupiter, you should easily be able to resolve the disk of the planet with your telescope, and maybe some of the darker cloud bands that stripe the largest planet in our solar system. You'll see up to four of its larger Galilean moons that circle the great planet in periods of 2 to 17 days. Some nights, you can't see all four because one or more of them may be behind Jupiter or lost in its glow.
Make sure you take long continuous views of Jupiter and its moons, or any other celestial target for that matter. A good three- to five-minute view is best so your eye can get used to the light level in your eyepiece.
There will be some nights when the views through your scope just aren't as crisp, which is called bad seeing conditions. That happens when the winds are high in the upper atmosphere. A tell-tale sign is when the stars are really twinkling vigorously. You may want to hold off on using your scope on those nights.
By the way, another wonderful telescope target that's not far away from Jupiter is the Orion Nebula in the sword of the constellation Orion the Hunter. It's a huge cloud of hydrogen gas, more than 30 light-years in diameter. That's almost 180 trillion miles in girth. It will have a slight greenish tinge to it and even in the smallest of telescopes, you'll see four stars that are arranged in a lopsided trapezoid. Those stars and many others that you can't see were all born out of the Orion Nebula. One of the stars in the trapezoid may only be 50,000 years old, which is extremely young for a star.
The glow of the nebula is caused by the extreme ultraviolet radiation from the new stars causing the hydrogen gas to light up like a neon light. Astronomers call this kind of nebula an emission nebula. The Orion nebula will produce many more stars in the future, maybe even another 10,000 stars the size of our sun.
Believe it or not, there are signs of spring in the February skies with the first early evening appearance of the constellation Leo the Lion. Leo resembles a backwards question mark in the eastern sky. You'll get a lot better look at it later in the evening, when it rises higher. Later on this spring, not far behind Leo the Lion, we'll get a really good look at the planet Mars, making its closest approach to Earth in two years. I'll have more on that later.
(Lynch is an amateur astronomer and author of the book, "Stars, a Month by Month Tour of the Constellations." Contact him at mikewlynch@comcast.net.)