For February, the waxing crescent moon is two degrees to the lower left of Venus, now near its greatest brightness. This would be a good evening to catch them together before sunset, easily visible in daylight by 4 in the SW. The first quarter moon sits five degrees north of Jupiter at sunset, almost directly overhead at sunset for us. On February 9th, the waxing gibbous moon makes a neat triangle with bright red Mars and Pollux in the Gemini. Farther north in Greenland, observers can see an occultation, which of course hopefully many of you observed last month on January 13. The Full Moon, the Hunger Moon, rises at sunset on February 12th. The last quarter moon rises at midnight on February 20th. The new moon is February 27th.

Mercury is lost in the Sun’s glare this month. Venus dominates the western sky, but starts overtaking us and retrograding this month. She appears as a bright crescent, growing larger in size but less lit this month in small telescopes. Mars is at its best. It was closest to us in January, but now well up in the NE at sunset and will reveal its North Polar Cap and some dark lava flows on its deserts with larger scopes, high power, and good seeing. Jupiter is also perfect for observing, almost overhead at sunset, and its four large moons and Great Red Spot visible in telescopes. But Saturn, its rings almost closed edge on, is lost in the glare of the Sun all month. When it emerges again in the dawn next month, we will be seeing the dark underside of the rings for the rest of 2025, and most scopes will only show the disk of the giant planet.

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. 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 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.

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 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 lies around the cluster shows up nicely in this fine photo of it.

Look closely at this Valentine’s Rose for you. The red of the petals is colored by ionized hydrogen, or an H II region. H I is just optically invisible neutral hydrogen, which can be mapped with radio telescope at 21 cm wavelength. II indicates the hydrogen atom is hot enough to ionize, with its single electron kicked up to higher energy orbitals. The particular red color is the emission line created by the electron falling from the third to the second excited state, and is the same red color some of you remember from last April 8th during totality as the bright red prominences extending over the limb of the totally eclipsed sun! The energy to ionize this gas comes from the hot young B class stars, just born in the center. Such clusters are forming from the inside out, with the expanding gases also rolling up the dark tendrils of carbon dust you see well at the top of James’ shot. As Carl Sagan noted, we are made of such star stuff, ashes of stars!

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 8, 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".