New year brings exciting sky features
A new year, full of exciting things to see in the night sky!
January begins with what may turn out to be a rather good meteor shower if you have a dark site and you can stay up until about 2 a.m. The Quadrantid Meteor Shower starts off the new year in the quite early morning of Jan. 4. It will peak about 2 a.m. CST, when the center of the radiant, that portion of the sky from which it appears the meteors are emerging, reaches overhead. Happily, the Moon will have set by about 1:30 a.m. Of course, it may rain or snow and it will certainly be cold.
Not everyone is the kind of person who will be up at 2 in the morning to watch a meteor shower. I know I am not, but if you are that kind of person, you could see approximately 25 meteors per hour — or maybe more. If you would like to try to capture a meteor in your camera, well, at least its trail across the sky, put your DSLR camera on a sturdy tripod, set the time for 30 seconds and an ISO of 1600. Aim the camera high in the northeast. Take as many images as you want and maybe you will get a nice streak across the night sky. Publish it on your Facebook account and wow your friends!
January starts the parade of winter constellations. Soon, Orion the Hunter will be prominent in the night sky at about 9 p.m., but not quite in January — more like February and March. Look in the northeast for Auriga the Charioteer and a bit east of overhead, look for the large constellation Andromeda. Gemini the twins will follow after Orion a bit later in the year.
Jupiter and Saturn will have practically disappeared from our view because the Earth will have moved in its orbit around the Sun so as to put these big gas giants behind our star — the Sun. They will soon be morning planets, rising in the east rather than setting in the west, as they have done for the last few months.
One compensation for no big planets to see is that Venus will be the dominant planet in the night sky. Venus is the next planet in towards the
Sun as seen from Earth. Lander missions and radar explorations reveal a really unpleasant, indeed dangerous, place on the surface of this planet. Temperatures are as high as several hundreds of degrees and the planet is covered with volcanoes, some active. The atmosphere is a deadly smog of sulfuric acid mist and carbon dioxide gas!
For the ordinary observer using a small telescope, the planet looks like a cue ball with phases. Pretty uninteresting but quite bright. Venus’ brightness makes it easy to find with the naked eye. Look in the southwest at dusk, about 45 minutes after sunset on Jan. 3. It will be about 25 degrees above the horizon and the brightest thing there, discounting the Moon when it reappears. By the end of the month, it will be about 35 degrees above the horizon. If you were to use a telescope, it will be featureless and very bright at about 2/3 full phase. When Galileo lived, Church dogma had declared that only the Moon had phases because Aristotle had said this. [For those of you interested in history, look up the Scholastics.] Galileo, using his small telescope, could see that Venus did have phases and this, along with some other counterdogma observations, such as the four brightest moons of Jupiter, would eventually earn Galileo house arrest in his old age.
If you are up at dawn, look to the southeast 45 minutes before sunrise to see Mars. It will be unimpressive to the naked eye and rather small in the typical amateur telescope.
But…the Earth and Mars will move closer together in their respective orbits and this will cause Mars to grow to nearly the same apparent size as in 2018, when it was at a close opposition. This will happen towards spring and I will be keeping track of it to try and photograph it. I failed to get a good image in 2018 but I may have a good second chance again in spring. I will share it if it is worth sharing…
I do hope the New Year finds you well and happy! I know the night sky will be full of free treasures, and I will try to bring some of them to you each month.
Clear skies!