The Evening Sky in January 2020

Download a PDF containing this chart, additional charts for specific areas of the sky and descriptions of interesting objects visible at this time of year.

The Evening Sky in January 2020

Venus is the brilliant 'evening star', appearing in the western sky soon after sunset. It sets two hours after the sun. It isn't of much interest in a telescope, looking like a tiny featureless gibbous (near full) Moon. It is on the far side of the sun, 180 million km away. It slowly catches up on us over the next four months. The thin crescent moon will be near Venus on the 28th. At the end of the month Mercury might be seen from places with a low western skyline. It sets toward the southwest 40 minutes after the sun.

Bright 'true' stars appear in the eastern half of the evening sky. Sirius is the brightest, appearing northeast of the zenith. Left of Sirius are bluish Rigel and orange Betelgeuse, the brightest stars in Orion the hunter. Between them, but fainter, is a line of three stars making Orion's belt. To southern hemisphere star watchers, Orion's belt makes the bottom of 'The Pot' or 'The Saucepan'. A faint line of stars above and right of the belt is the pot's handle or Orion's sword. The sword has a glowing cloud at its centre: the Orion Nebula.

Left of Orion is the V-shaped pattern of stars making the face of Taurus the Bull. The V-shaped group is called the Hyades cluster. It is 150 light years^* away. Orange Aldebaran, making one eye of the bull, is not a member of the cluster but on the line of sight, half the cluster's distance.

Left again, toward the north and lower, is the Pleiades/Matariki/Seven Sisters/ Subaru star cluster. Pretty to the eye and impressive in binoculars, it is 440 light years from us. From northern New Zealand the bright star Capella is on the north skyline. It 42 light years away and 190 times brighter than the sun.

Low in the south are Crux, the Southern Cross, and Beta and Alpha Centauri, often called 'The Pointers'. Alpha Centauri is the closest naked-eye star, 4.3 light years away. Beta Centauri, like most of the stars in Crux, is a blue-giant star hundreds of light years away. Canopus is also very luminous and distant: 13 000 times brighter than the sun and 300 light years away.

The Milky Way is in the eastern sky, brightest in the southeast toward Crux. It can be traced towards the north but becomes faint below Orion. The Milky Way is our edgewise view of the Galaxy, the pancake of billions of stars of which the sun is just one. Binoculars show many star clusters and a few glowing gas clouds in the Milky Way, particularly in the Carina region. The Milky Way is faint left of Orion because we are looking toward its thin outer edge. The centre region of the Galaxy, in Sagittarius, is hidden by the sun at this time of year.

The Clouds of Magellan, LMC and SMC, are high in the southern sky and easily seen by eye on a dark moonless night. They look like faintly luminous clouds. They are two small galaxies about 160 000 and 200 000 light years away. The Large Magellanic Cloud is about 5% the mass of the Milky Way. The Small Cloud is about 3%, but that is still billions of stars.

Mars and Jupiter are visible in the morning sky. Mars rises in the southeast around 3 a.m. It looks like a moderately bright reddish star. It will be near Antares, an orange-red star. The name Antares means 'rival to Mars' in Greek. Just now Antares outshines its rival by half a magnitude. Mars will be above and left of Antares at the beginning of the month; below and right by the end. It is 310 million km away, so very small in a telescope. The moon will appear close to Mars on the 21st.

Jupiter is low in the southeast dawn twilight at the beginning of the month. It rise four minutes earlier each day so, by mid-month, it is rising an hour before the sun. It is the brightest 'star' in the morning sky. Jupiter is 920 million km away but, being the biggest planet, shows a disk even in binoculars. Its four big moons can be seen in a small telescope but the view will be blurry while Jupiter is low in the sky. The moon will be near Jupiter on the 23rd and 24th.

^*A light year is the distance that light travels in one year: nearly 10 million million km or 10¹³ km. Sunlight takes eight minutes to get here; moonlight about one second. Sunlight reaches Neptune, the outermost major planet, in four hours. It takes sunlight four years to reach the nearest star, Alpha Centauri.

Newsletter editor:

Alan Gilmore	Phone: 03 680 6817
P.O. Box 57	Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Lake Tekapo 7945
New Zealand