SKY GUIDE: This map represents the night sky as it appears over Maine during February. The stars are shown as they appear at 10:30 p.m. early in the month, at 9:30 p.m. at midmonth, and at 8:30 p.m. at month’s end. Uranus is shown at its midmonth position. To use the map, hold it vertically and turn it so that the direction you are facing is at the bottom. Sky Chart prepared by Seth Lockman

The month of February is named after the Latin term februum, which means purification. The Roman purification rituals named Februa were held every Feb. 15 on the old Roman calendar.

We will reach the middle of winter as of Feb. 2, which is commonly known as Groundhog Day. This is our version of the original Celtic cross-quarter days which divide each of our four seasons in half. Candlemas is their name for Groundhog Day. Then the halfway point between spring and summer is called Beltane, which is the same as our May Day. Then we have Lammas Day on Aug. 1, halfway between summer and fall. That word means “loaf mass” which marked the beginning of the wheat harvest. Then our Halloween is Samhain or “summer’s end” in the Celtic tradition. The seasons are important turning points to understand the earth and its motions better, but it is also important to understand the midpoint of those seasons.

This month of February will not be quite as dramatic as January, but every month is always unique and different and it is always well worth getting outside under the night sky for a while as often as you can. At least the days are getting noticeably longer now and the days will be nearly 11 1/2 hours long by the end of this month, with just three weeks until the vernal equinox gets here once again. The sun will feel a little stronger and higher each clear day this month.

The other highlights include Venus reaching it greatest brilliancy for the year on Feb. 12 at minus-4.9 magnitude, which is a full magnitude or two and a half times brighter than it is when it reaches it least brilliancy at minus-3.9 magnitude. We started last month with four planets visible in the evening sky. Three have migrated to the morning sky, creating a nice morning lineup for us with four bright planets, since Mars was already there. Look low in the eastern sky 30 minutes before sunrise to spot this nice celestial slow-moving dance. Venus will be the highest, and then Mars, then Mercury, and Saturn will be the lowest one in our sky. Watch this on Feb. 27 when the waning crescent moon will join this quartet of planets, producing a great show in Sagittarius just below the Summer Triangle. Jupiter remains as the only evening planet, low in the western sky, but we lose it completely by the middle of the month.

There will be no meteor showers until the Lyrids on April 20, but you can still catch up to three or four stray meteors every hour from a dark sky site. The largest asteroid, Ceres, will track right through Taurus between the Hyades and Pleiades open star clusters all month. Ceres is now a dwarf planet along with Pluto, but it used to be a full-fledged planet for about 50 years until 1850. Ceres is 600 miles across, or about the size of Texas. It will reach 8.5 magnitude, or about 10 times fainter than anything you could see with the naked eye. The first quarter moon will pass very close to Ceres on the night of Feb. 8 into the morning of Feb. 9.

There will not be any good comets this month, but Comet Borrelly will track from Pisces into Aries all this month. It will only reach 10th magnitude, or about 50 times fainter than anything you could see with the naked eye, so you need a good telescope to spot it. There is a very interesting phenomenon that starts to become visible this month and next about an hour after sunset low in the western sky. The other time to best see these, called the zodiacal light, is an hour before sunrise in the southeastern sky in October and November. The reason for those times is that the angle that the ecliptic makes with our horizon is at its steepest at those times of the year for us in the northern hemisphere, allowing this light to become better visible, even though it is always there.

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I have only seen this subtle light three or four times. It is much easier to see far away from any artificial light. This haystack or pyramid of light consists of many trillions of tiny meteoritic particles that form a torus or doughnut-shaped ring along the ecliptic plane of our solar system. You can see them because they reflect the sunlight back to us. You are not seeing only a single comet when you see this enigmatic light, but you are actually seeing the dusty remains of thousands or even millions of long-dead comets.

The size of these tiny particles ranges from 10 to 300 microns, which is a millionth of a meter. By comparison, the width of a human hair is 70 microns, so some of those tiny particles would be visible without a microscope. The particles eventually spiral into the sun, but new ones are always being created from the dust of comets, asteroids, and meteoroids as they pass through our solar system. Every single day the earth gathers up 140 tons of this dust as we continually orbit the sun at 18.6 miles per second, or only 10,000 times slower than the speed of light. Look for this ethereal cone of light on clear nights with no moon present and get as far away from any towns as you can. The cone-shaped glow will stretch upward through Taurus the Bull.

Venus will be the star performer this month and the rest of the planets will serve as her backup cast. It will rise two hours before the sun and remain visible for a while even after the sun appears. Since Venus turned into a morning planet last month, it will now dazzle us with its brilliance for most of the month. With access to a telescope, you can also watch its rapid transformation each morning as it changes shape from spanning 49 arc seconds of the sky and being a thin crescent of only 16% to spanning only 32 arc seconds and becoming 38% illuminated by the sun. That is only 60 times smaller than the moon, which always spans very close to 30 arc minutes or half a degree of our sky, which is the same size as the sun.

Watch how Venus is getting smaller in the sky even as it is getting more illuminated. There is a trade-off here and Venus always reaches its greatest brilliancy at 26% lit. That will happen on Feb. 12 Venus will appear brighter than usual since its slightly elliptical orbit will bring it closer to us than on other orbits when it reaches 26% illuminated.

Mars was already a morning planet before Venus joined it. Mars will be about 7 degrees to the right and below Venus in the constellation of Sagittarius, but it will be just over 250 times fainter than Venus. Then Mercury and Saturn will show up below and to the left of Mars, rounding out this morning cast of the great play of our solar system.

FEBRUARY HIGHLIGHTS

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Feb. 1: New moon is at 12:46 a.m.

Feb. 2: The moon passes 4 degrees south of Jupiter tonight.

Feb. 4: Clyde Tombaugh was born in 1906. He would discover Pluto on the Feb. 18, 1930.

Feb. 5: Apollo 14 landed on the moon in 1971, becoming our third manned landing and the last one before we brought along lunar rovers for the last three missions. Astronauts Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell collected 93 pounds of moon rocks on that trip.

Feb. 7: The first untethered space walk happened in 1984. The Stardust Comet Probe to Comet Wild2 was launched in 1999. It was the first mission to return some samples of dust from this comet and some other cosmic dust to Earth.

Feb. 8: First quarter moon is at 8:50 a.m. Jules Verne was born in 1828.

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Feb. 10: The moon is at apogee or farthest from Earth at 251,591 miles.

Feb. 12: Venus reaches its greatest brilliancy today at magnitude minus 4.9. Venus passes 7 degrees north of Mars.

Feb. 14: In 1990, Voyager 1 took the first ever family portrait of six planets in our solar system including the famous “Pale Blue Dot” image of Earth, inspired by Carl Sagan. The Swiss astronomer, Fritz Zwicky, was born in 1898. He first proposed the existence of dark matter in 1933 and coined the term supernova the next year.

Feb. 15: In 2013, the Chelyabinsk meteor exploded a few miles over this Russian city. It was about 50 feet in diameter and left thousands of meteorites on the ground. Galileo was born in 1564.

Feb. 16: Full moon is at 11:56 a.m. This is also known as the Snow or Hunger Moon.

Feb. 19: Copernicus was born in 1473. He suggested that the sun is really the center of the solar system and Galileo later proved that.

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Feb. 23: Last quarter moon is at 5:32 p.m. In 1987, the light from a supernova in the Large Magellanic cloud, one of two satellite galaxies to our own Milky Way, was first seen on Earth. That supernova actually exploded 160,000 earlier, since that is the distance to the LMC.

Feb. 27: The moon passes 9 degrees south of Venus and 4 degrees south of Mars this morning.

Feb. 28: The moon passes 4 degrees south of Mercury and Saturn this morning.

Bernie Reim of Wells is co-director of the Astronomical Society of Northern New England.


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