Wintertime is a wonderful time for stargazing, the super bowl of stargazing, as far as I’m concerned.
The best part of winter stargazing is what I call Orion’s great gang of constellations. As darkness sets it they start out in the southeast sky and then reach their highest point above the southern horizon by around 9 p.m. The constellations surrounding Orion are Gemini the Twins, Canis Major and Minor, the big and little dogs respectively, Auriga the sheep-schlepping retired chariot driver, and Taurus the Bull with the bright Pleiades star cluster, also known as the “Seven Little Sisters”. Without a doubt Orion and his gang have the largest collection of bright stars assembled anywhere across the night sky in the Northern hemisphere.
In the northern skies look for the Big Dipper, standing up on its handle, and the giant upside down “W” that outlines the throne of the constellation Cassiopeia. You can see those constellations and a few others every night in the north as they make a tight circle around Polaris, the stationary North Star. Polaris is about halfway from the northern horizon to the overhead zenith, and every celestial object in the entire sky appears to revolve around it every 24 hours.
If you’re a fan of evening planet viewing you’ve been pretty much shut out since last summer but that’s changing. If you stay up late enough, you’ll see a very bright “star” rising in the eastern skies. That’s Jupiter, the biggest planet in our solar system. Jupiter is now rising above the eastern horizon by around 9 p.m.
What’s really exciting right now is that for the next couple of weeks in the predawn early morning sky you can see all five fellow planet in our solar system at one time that are visible to the naked eye.
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