Podcaster: Ralph & Paul
Title : Awesome Astronomy’s February Sky Guide
Organization: Awesome Astronomy
Link : www.awesomeastronomy.com
Description: What to look out, and up, for in February. We start with a new feature the beginner’s or young observer’s guide and a tour of the constellation Orion. Next up is our round up of the planets available this month to northern hemisphere observers, interesting lunar features and meteor showers. And we finish off with the best stars and deep sky objects on offer in the constellations Monoceros and Cancer.
Bio: Awesome Astronomy is the show for anyone and everyone who has even the slightest interest in astronomy and science.
Join Ralph & Paul at the beginning of each month, for an informative and fun astronomy programme telling you what to look out (and up) for every month. You can be guaranteed a passion for astronomy, simple explanations of complex and fundamental topics, space and science news, absorbing interviews and listeners’ astronomy questions answered.
As both presenters have been accused of being a little skeptical in the past, you can also expect everything to be frivolous but fact-based
Today’s sponsor: This episode of “365 Days of Astronomy” is sponsored by — no one. We still need sponsors for many days in 2013, so please consider sponsoring a day or two. Just click on the “Donate” button on the lower left side of this webpage, or contact us at signup@365daysofastronomy.org.
Transcript:
February: cold winter nights but getting shorter all the time and by month’s end we’ll be getting back to dark skies that are only ten hours long. But before we explore the best on offer in February, let’s spend a minute or two on that beginners’ challenge to help our younger and less experienced listeners learn their way around the sky and give them something to look out for.
First up, lets take a look for the most brilliant and obvious constellation in the sky at this time of year – Orion the Hunter.
If you look south as soon as it’s dark anytime this month you’ll see the line of three bright stars that represent Orion the Hunter’s belt. These belt stars are known, from left to right as Alnitak, Alnilam and Mintaka.
In the region to the left of Alnitak, the left-hand belt star, sits the beautiful Flame Nebula, popular among amatuer imagers, and the Horsehead Nebula made famous by NASA & ESA’s Hubble Space Telescope.
But we’re not going there for this simple taster, we’re going to pull back out of the belt stars a little and look into the sword that hangs from Orion’s belt. In clear skies you’ll easily make out three stars that point downward and the middle star will look a little fuzzy. Beacuse that’s not a star at all, or rather, it’s not one star, but a collection of stars in the centre of a naked eye visible gas cloud that’s condensing to create new stars. This is Messier 42 or the Great Nebula in Orion – the nearest star-forming region to our solar system. One of the grandest objects in the night sky and one of the easiest to spot.
Take a look with the naked eye throughout the month, or delve deeper with a pair of binoculars or a telescope to find the Trapezium star cluster and reveal those tendrils of gas illuminated by the stars they created.
But we’re not done there. There’s much more in Orion to enjoy. Having such a beautiful nebula in it’s heart, God decided to frame the picture with 4 bright stars. These stars and nebulae are framed by four bright stars. In the top left is the swollen red giant Betelgeuse. Top right is the nearest of these framing stars, Bellatrix, 8 times larger than the sun and 4 times hotter. Bottom right is the brightest, yet most distant of the quartet, the blue supergiant Rigel. Finally, bottom left is Saiph, another blue supergiant as much as 22 times the size of the sun.
All these combine to make Orion perhaps the jewel of the winter constellations, and no evening’s observing – or imaging – is complete without at least a scan of this region.
So let us know how you get on observing this wonder of the winter skies by tweeting your observations and any images to @aweseomeastropod, or show them off on our Facebook Group.
Now, moving onto the planets, Jupiter’s now a month past opposition but is still dominating the sky. Easily located in Gemini, the King of the planets will be giving us great views of cloud detail and the movements of the four Galilean moons. With the long nights you can witness an entire Jupiter rotation, taking in the great red spot, track storms and those enigmatic barges as well as watch the movements of the four brightest moons. With Io and Europa so close to Jupiter you will definitely be able to track their movements in a few hours observing and of course night after night the pattern the moons make changes. Here is one of the first pieces of concrete evidence that our Earth was not at the centre of the universe, so do take time to enjoy one of history’s most important and beautiful discoveries.
And, of course, with Jupiter being so well presented still – just a month past opposition, an opportunity to image the gas giant can’t be missed for any experienced imagers or intrepid observers. It you have a steady telescope mount and a webcam with a nosepiece adapter – such as the Toucam or Phillips SPC900, or a DSLR camera on video mode and a T-ring adapter to attach it to your scope, these methods willll let you record movies onto a laptop, that you can run through free specialist software – such as Registax or AutoStakkert – to create super-resolution images revealing Jupiter’s moons and the swirling clouds and storms in the planet’s upper atmosphere.
And don’t be fazed by this astro-trickery if you’re new to it, because our website at AwesomeAstronomy.com has loads of simple step-by-step guides to get you started or improve your technique. Just look for ‘Tutorials’ or ‘Webcam Imaging Tutorials’ on the homepage.
And this really is an opportunity not to be missed as Jupiter won’t be as high in the sky and as close to earth as it currently is for the best part of a decade
Then the other evening planet visiting our skies in February is Mercury, its difficult to find and many an amateur astronomer has never seen it. Look low down in the sky after sunset in the first part of the month. It is presenting a 47% phase and on the first will be sharing the sky with a thin crescent moon.
Early risers will be treated to a parade of planets across the southern sky through February, with Mars, Saturn and Venus lining up across the ecliptic before the sun rises. Mars is reaching a decent altitude at last and is rising in the east before midnight. Still not an impressive disc but larger scopes might now pick up some detail and hints of the polar cap. Saturn rises next and is always impressive, even this far from opposition. While the ring world is going to be low in the sky for northern observers for many years the angle of the rings is very impressive and well worth a look. Venus is the bright morning star this month and is blazing away as the brightest object in the sky after the moon and Sun at a magnitude over -4. Looking through a scope reveals a bright planetary disc that through the month is growing in illumination from 13 to 35%. It’s difficult to find any cloud detail on Venus, but those with colour filters might have some luck.
The moon has no new phase this month as new moons fall on the 31st of January and 1st of March. The moon sets the romantic tone though by reaching its full phase on February the 14th. his means that dark sky observing is best pencilled in for the beginning and end of the month as the moon moves out of the way, while lunar observers will getting in their time around the middle two weeks of February.
And as an added treat, why not see if you can find the landing site of the Chinese Chang’e-3 lander and rover? From this distance, no telescope will let you see the rover or its tracks unfortunately – only NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter around the moon can do that – but you can gaze deep into the Bay of Rainbows where Chang’e-3 sits on the western promontory to the Mare Imbrium that looks a little like Mickey Mouse’s ear! The Mare Imbrium and Bay of Rainbows are both beautiful to observe just past 1st quarter and just before last quarter moon.
This month’s constellation and deep sky recommendations are the constellations that follow behind Orion – Monoceros and Cancer. Monoceros is a rather indistinct constellation representing the mythical oddity that is the Unicorn, which despite the Greek name is actually quite a modern constellation. But despite being a faint constellation Monoceros is hiding wondrous treasure for both visual observers and imagers.
There is the heart shaped M50 open cluster that is easily found in binoculars or a small scope, the Rosetta Nebula, a vast cloud 100 light years across and so named for its vast rosette like petals. There is the Christmas Tree Cluster and its associated Cone Nebula -NGC2264 as well as well as the small but stunning NGC2254 open cluster and the Hubble’s Variable Nebula – a nebula and star interacting that may be in an early stage of planetary system evolution.
Cancer, like Monoceros, is quite a faint constellation with no great stand out stars, certainly this patch of sky looks rather barren between Orion and Leo, but Cancer contains two gems in the form of M44 and M67. M44, the Beehive Cluster or Praesepe is a close open cluster of around 50 stars and very obvious to the naked eye as a nebulous patch in darker skies, while being a great binocular target. It is thought to be of a similar age and origin to the Hyades in Taurus. M67 is smaller due to distance but a larger cluster in population, appearing as a concentrated cluster of at least 500 stars. It is an interesting oddity in its age, with most open clusters having ages in the millions of years before dispersing; M67 is at least 3 Billion years old and maybe as much as 5 billion.
And, again, like Orion, this is where the winter skies provide for some excellent quarry for the imagers. With Monoceros and Cancer treating us to nebulae and star clusters that benefit from long exposure photography without breaking the bank. Both the Rosette Nebula in Monoceros and the Beehive Cluster in Cancer are so large that only the smaller scopes can fit them fully into view of the sensor and can therefore be imaged without even using a scope at all. A DSLR camera, attached to a tracking mount, with exposure times of 30 seconds to a minute, should reveal this nebula and cluster very nicely.
End of podcast:
365 Days of Astronomy
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