The Evening Sky in February 2025
Venus and Jupiter are ‘evening stars’ in February. Brilliant silver Venus is low in the west. It sets around 10:40 p.m. NZDT at the beginning of the month and around 9 p.m. at the end. The Moon will be near Venus on the 2nd. Golden Jupiter appears in the north soon after sunset. It sets after 2 a.m. at the beginning of the month and around 12:30 at the end. The Moon will be near Jupiter on the 7th. Orange Mars is also an ‘evening star’, low in the northeast, much fainter than Jupiter but the brightest ‘star’ in that part of the sky. The Moon will be near Mars on the 9th and 10th.
Venus is catching up on Earth on the inside track. It passes between us and the Sun in March. Much of its sunlit side is turned away from us so in a telescope it appears as a tall thin crescent. The disk of Jupiter can be seen in a small telescope with its ‘Galilean moons’ lined up on each side. Larger telescopes show parallel stripes in Jupiter’s clouds. Mars is a tiny disk in a telescope.
Sirius and Canopus are the brightest true stars. Sirius, the brightest of all the stars, is north of overhead. Canopus, the second brightest star, is a bit south of overhead. Both stars are white in colour.
Sirius, 'the Dog Star', marks the head of Canis Major the big dog. Sirius is 8.6 light-years* away and 30 times brighter than the Sun. A group of stars above and right of it make the dog's hindquarters and tail, upside down. Procyon, in the northeast below Sirius, marks the smaller of the two dogs that follow Orion the hunter across the sky.
Below and left of Sirius are bluish Rigel and orange Betelgeuse, the brightest stars in Orion. Between them is a line of three stars: Orion's belt. To southern hemisphere star watchers, the line of three makes the bottom of 'The Pot'. The handle of The Pot is Orion's sword, a fainter line of stars above the bright three. At its centre is the Orion Nebula; a glowing gas cloud 1300 light-years away, seen in binoculars.
Above Jupiter is the orange star Aldebaran making one eye of Taurus the bull. It is on one tip of an upside-down V of stars making the face of Taurus. These constellation pictures were thought up by northern hemisphere folk so are upside down to us. Well left of Jupiter, near the northwest skyline, is the Pleiades/Matariki star cluster.
The V-shaped group is called the Hyades cluster. It is 130 light-years away. Aldebaran is not a member of the cluster but merely on the line of sight, 65 light years from us. It is a red-giant star 145 times brighter than the sun. The Pleiades/Matariki star cluster is also known as the Seven Sisters and Subaru among many names. The cluster is 440 light years from us. From northern Aotearoa the bright star Capella is on the north skyline. It is 90,000 times brighter than the sun and 3300 light years away.
Crux, the Southern Cross, is in the southeast. Below it are Beta and Alpha Centauri, often called 'The Pointers'. Alpha Centauri is the closest naked-eye star, 4.3 light-years away. Beta Centauri is a blue-giant star hundreds of light years away, as are most of the stars in Crux. Canopus is also a very luminous distant star; 13,000 times brighter than the sun and 300 light-years away.
The Milky Way is brightest in the southeast toward Crux. It can be traced up the sky, fading where it is nearly overhead. It becomes very faint east, or right, of Orion. The Milky Way is our edgewise view of the galaxy, the pancake of billions of stars of which the sun is just one. Star clusters and a glowing gas cloud can be seen in binoculars in the Carina region above Crux.
The Clouds of Magellan, LMC and SMC are high in the south sky, easily seen by eye on a dark moonless night. They are two small galaxies about 160,000 and 200,000 light years away. Beside the Small Cloud (SMC) is the globular star cluster 47 Tucanae. It looks like a round smudge of light in binoculars. Telescopes show it as a cluster of thousands of faint stars. It is 13,000 light years away. Omega Centauri, left of The Pointers is also a globular cluster, 17,000 light-years away.
*A light year (l.y.) is the distance that light travels in one year: nearly 10 million million km or 10^13 km. Sunlight takes eight minutes to get here; moonlight about one second. Sunlight reaches Neptune, the outermost major planet, in four hours. It takes four years for sunlight to reach the nearest star, Alpha Centauri.
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