31 December 2023
I hope you had a great Christmas or whatever holiday you celebrate this time of year. I hope you enjoyed the full moon this past week. At least for me it really adds to the holiday magic, especially if you can enjoy it in a forested countryside. I love seeing moonlight bathing the tops of evergreen trees.
As we say goodbye to 2023 and usher in 2024, the moon is on the wane, making it easier to appreciate the bright winter stars and constellations, especially in and around the mighty constellation Orion rising in the early evening eastern sky. The brightest of the stars in the winter sky right now is actually the mighty planet Jupiter. With even a small telescope or a nice pair of binoculars, you can easily resolve the disk of the planet that’s so large over a thousand Earths could fit inside this giant ball of mainly hydrogen gas. You might even spot some of Jupiter’s cloud bands of methane, ammonia and other gases. You’ll surely see up to four of Jupiter’s largest moons, resembling tiny stars on both sides of the planet from our view. As they orbit Jupiter in periods of two to 17 days they are constantly changing their positions relative to the planet. There are many times you can’t see all four because one or more may be behind Jupiter or camouflaged in front of it.
(Mike Lynch)
I have a specific assignment for night owls bringing in the new year this week. If you can handle staying up until midnight and putting up with the January cold. Around the midnight hour, face the southern half of the sky. That’s where Jupiter, the constellation Orion the Hunter, and a gang of other brilliant winter constellations are holding court. They’re my absolute favorites, clustered around the mighty hunter. Orion’s most striking feature is his belt, made up of three bright stars in a near-perfect row.
Extending Orion’s belt with your mind’s eye to the lower left, you’ll run right into a seriously bright star. That’s Sirius, the brightest actual star in the entire night sky and the brightest star in the constellation Canis Major, Orion’s loyal hunting dog. One of Sirius’s nicknames is the “Dog Star.” You won’t find any brighter star than Sirius in any part of the night sky or any other time of the year around here. What’s unique about Sirius this time of year is that the brightest star in the night sky reaches its highest point in the celestial dome around midnight. When the clock strikes midnight on Jan. 1, Sirius is precisely at its zenith.
Sirius, nicknamed the Dog Star, is such a bright shiner mainly because it’s one of the closer stars to Earth, at least relatively speaking. Sirius is roughly 8.5 light-years away, which is roughly 50 trillion miles away. Believe it or not, that’s considered down the block astronomically. It’s right in the sun’s immediate neighborhood. Even with the naked eye, most stars are much farther away, some hundreds, even thousands of light-years away. I find that so remarkable.
Sirius (Mike Lynch)
Astronomically Sirius is actually a double star. Sirius A is much larger and brighter than its companion Sirius B. Sirius A is well over a million miles in diameter, roughly 1.5 times that of our sun, and is almost twice as hot as our home star. It also kicks out more than 25 times the light and energy of the sun. It’s far from one of the biggest stars in our home Milky Way Galaxy, but if you put it in place of the sun in our solar system, Sirius would fry us all. So it’s just as well that Sirius is 50 trillion miles away.
One of the most incredible things about stargazing is that these stars are so far away that we don’t see them as they are now. Since Sirius is over eight light-years away, you’re seeing what it looked like in about the middle of 2015 when David Letterman said goodbye to late-night TV, and Apple introduced the Apple Watch.
Enjoy the highest and brightest star in the midnight hour this New Year’s Eve, and wish upon that star a great and more peaceful 2024.
Mike Lynch is an amateur astronomer and retired broadcast meteorologist for WCCO Radio in Minneapolis/St. Paul. He is the author of “Stars: a Month by Month Tour of the Constellations,” published by Adventure Publications and available at bookstores and adventurepublications.net. Mike is available for private star parties. You can contact him at [email protected].
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