FRIDAY, JANUARY 16
■ Zero-magnitude Capella high overhead, and equally bright Rigel in Orion’s foot, have almost exactly the same right ascension. This means they cross your sky’s meridian at almost exactly the same time: around 9 or 10 p.m. now, depending on how far east or west you live in your time zone. So whenever Capella passes its very highest, Rigel always marks true south over your landscape, and vice versa.
Capella goes exactly through your zenith if you’re at latitude 46° north: near Portland Oregon, Minneapolis, Montreal, Portland Maine, central France, Odesa, Kherson.
SATURDAY, JANUARY 17
■ If your sky is reasonably dark, see if you can trace out the winter Milky Way arching across the sky. In early evening it extends up from the west-northwest horizon along the vertical Northern Cross of Cygnus, then farther up and over to the right past dim Cepheus and through Cassiopeia high in the north, then to the right and lower right through Perseus and Auriga, down between the feet of Gemini and Orion’s Club, and on down toward the east-southeast horizon between Procyon and Sirius.
SUNDAY, JANUARY 18
■ Sirius twinkles brightly after dinnertime below Orion in the southeast. Around 8 or 9 p.m., depending on your location, Sirius shines precisely below fiery Betelgeuse in Orion’s shoulder. How accurately can you time this event for your location, perhaps judging against the vertical edge of a building?
Of the two, Sirius leads early in the evening. Betelgeuse leads later.
■ New Moon (exact at 2:52 p.m. EST).
MONDAY, JANUARY 19
■ Orion is high in the southeast right after dark and stands highest due south around 9 p.m. Orion is the brightest of the 88 constellations, but his main pattern is surprisingly small compared to some of his dimmer neighbors. The biggest of these is Eridanus the River to his west (i.e. right), enormous but hard to trace. Dimmer Fornax the Furnace, to Eridanus’s lower right, is almost as big as Orion!
Even the main pattern of Lepus, the Hare cowering under the Hunter’s feet, isn’t that much smaller than he is.
Do you know the constellation down below Lepus? It’s a tough one: Columba the Dove, faint, sprawly, and to my eye not a bit dove-like. See the constellation chart in the center of the February Sky & Telescope. Its brightest star, Alpha Columbae or Phact, is magnitude 2.6. To find it, draw a line from Rigel through Beta Leporis (the front star of the bunny’s neck in his stick-figure pattern) and extend the line an equal distance straight on.
TUESDAY, JANUARY 20
■ For lots of us, one of the most familiar binocular asterisms in winter is the tiny head of Orion. To the naked eye under all-too-typical light pollution, his head is just a point: Lambda Orionis, magnitude 3.4. But binoculars easily show that Lambda is the top of a nice little triangle ¾° tall. The triangle’s other two stars are Phi1 and Phi2 Orionis, magnitudes 4.4 and 4.1, respectively.
Now look carefully. Three faint stars form a strikingly perfect little row between Lambda and Phi1. They’re magnitudes 6.7, 7.4, and 7.6 counting northward. See image below. They make the asterism unique.
Lambda and Phi1 are blue-white giants, spectral type B2, about 1,000 light-years away. Phi2 is a yellow G8 giant nine times closer in the foreground.
In a telescope at high power, Lambda is a nice double star: magnitudes 3.5 and 5.5, separation 4.3 arcseconds, with the faint star northeast of the bright one.
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 21
■ The crescent Moon sinks in the west-southwest during and after dusk, with 1st-magnitude Saturn looking on less than two fists to its upper left, as shown below.
The same distance left or lower left of Saturn tonight (out of the chart), 2nd-magnitude Beta Ceti makes a wide isosceles triangle with the two of them.
■ Jupiter is only 12 days past its opposition, so Jupiter’s moons and their shadows still cross the planet’s face fairly close together. This evening Io, Jupiter’s innermost and fastest large satellite, creeps onto Jupiter’s eastern limb at 6:50 p.m. EST followed by its tiny black shadow at 7:08 p.m. EST. Then Io buds off from Jupiter’s western limb at 9:06 p.m. EST, again followed by its shadow 18 minutes later.
THURSDAY, JANUARY 22
■ Now the thickening Moon is only about a half a fist from Saturn, as shown above (for North America).
■ The Pleiades are at their peak these evenings. The thumbprint-sized cluster transits very high overhead an hour after dark now, with the tiny dipper asterism of their six brightest stars almost level if you’re facing south.
There’s more to be found telescopically in and around the Pleiades than you probably know, including abundant double stars. See the charts and pix in Ken Hewitt-White’s “A Bang and a Whimper” in the January Sky & Telescope, page 55.
FRIDAY, JANUARY 23
■ These evenings, spot the equilateral Winter Triangle in the southeast. Sirius is its lowest and brightest star. Betelgeuse stands above Sirius by about two fists at arm’s length. Left of their midpoint shines Procyon.
Can you discern their colors? Sirius (spectral type A0) is cold white, Betelgeuse (M2) is yellowish orange, and Procyon (F5) is a pale, very slightly yellowish white.
And, standing 4° above Procyon is 3rd-magnitude Gomeisa, Beta Canis Minoris, the only other easy naked-eye star of Canis Minor.
SATURDAY, JANUARY 24
■ In early evening, the enormous Andromeda-Pegasus complex runs from very high in the west down to low in the west.
Face west after nightfall and look straight up. Perseus is crossing the zenith. A fist of so west of there, spot Andromeda’s high foot: 2nd-magnitude Gamma Andromedae (Almach), slightly orange. Andromeda is standing on her head, which is also the top corner of the Great Square of Pegasus.
Down from the Square’s bottom corner run the stars profiling the back of Pegasus’s neck and head, ending with a rightward jag to his nose: 2nd-magnitude Enif, due west. It too is slightly orange.
That bright point off to the lower left of the Great Square is Saturn.
SUNDAY, JANUARY 25
■ First-quarter Moon (exact at 11:47 p.m. EST). The Moon shines in Aries. Spot Alpha Arietis and dimmer Beta Arietis a few degrees to the Moon’s upper right, one above the other.
On the half-lit Moon itself, the sunrise terminator is just beginning to unveil Mare Imbrium in the lunar north. The Alps and Apennine mountain ranges outline Imbrium’s early sunlit rim standing out in stark, long-shadowed relief. Cupped inside them are the smallish craters Aristillus and Autolycus, almost exactly on the terminator’s edge (for evening hours in the Americas).
The terminator from the center of the lunar disk southward crosses the rugged, heavily cratered Southern Highlands.
Barely beyond the dark edge of the terminator, find some tiny, starlike speck of a peak catching the very first rays of the sun. How soon during your observing session can you see it visibly growing?
This Week’s Planet Roundup
Mercury, Venus, and Mars all remain out of sight behind the glare of the Sun.
Jupiter (magnitude –2.6, shining in the Pollux stick figure of the Gemini twins) is just past its January 9th opposition. It shines low in the east-northeast during dusk, dominates the east after dark, then later the high southeast. Castor and Pollux shine nearby. Jupiter this week remains within 1° or so of Delta Geminorum, magnitude 3.5. Watch them pull a little farther apart each night.
Jupiter is highest in the south and thus telescopically sharpest by 11 p.m. It’s a big 47 or 46 arcseconds wide all week. See “Jupiter Rules!” in the January Sky & Telescope, page 48, which includes a map naming its dark belts and bright zones.
Saturn (magnitude +1.1, at the Aquarius-Pisces border) is the brightest dot in the southwest at nightfall, lower left of the Great Square of Pegasus. It descends through the evening and sets in the west around 9 or 1o p.m.
In a telescope Saturn’s rings are still very thin but gradually opening up. They’re now tilted almost 2° to our line of sight. The rings’ thin black shadow on Saturn’s globe is slowly widening too.
Uranus (magnitude 5.6, in Taurus 5° south of the Pleiades) is very high in the south after dark. At high power in a telescope it’s a tiny but non-stellar dot, 3.8 arcseconds wide. You’ll need a detailed finder chart to identify it among similar-looking faint stars, such as the chart in the November Sky & Telescope, page 49.
Neptune is a telescopic “star” of magnitude 7.9, a dim speck just 2.3 arcseconds wide 2° from Saturn. For Neptune you’ll need an even more detailed finder chart.
All descriptions that relate to your horizon — including the words up, down, right, and left — are written for the world’s mid-northern latitudes. Descriptions and graphics that also depend on longitude (mainly Moon positions) are for North America. Eastern Standard Time (EST) is Universal Time minus 5 hours. UT is also known as UTC, GMT, or Z time.
Want to become a better astronomer? Learn your way around the constellations. They’re the key to locating everything fainter and deeper to hunt with binoculars or a telescope.
This is an outdoor nature hobby. For a more detailed constellation guide covering the whole evening sky, use the big monthly map in the center of each issue of Sky & Telescope, the essential magazine of astronomy.
For the attitude every amateur astronomer needs, read Jennifer Willis’s Modest Expectations Give Rise to Delight.
Once you get a telescope, to put it to good use you’ll want a much more detailed, large-scale sky atlas (set of charts). The basic standard is the Pocket Sky Atlas, in either the original or Jumbo Edition. Both show all 30,000 stars to magnitude 7.6, and 1,500 deep-sky targets — star clusters, nebulae, and galaxies — to search out among them.
Next up is the larger and deeper Sky Atlas 2000.0, plotting stars to magnitude 8.5; nearly three times as many, as well as many more deep-sky objects. It’s currently out of print, but maybe you can find one used.
The next up, once you know your way around well, are the even larger Interstellarum Deep-Sky Atlas (with 201,000+ stars to magnitude 9.5 and 14,000 deep-sky objects selected to be detectable by eye in very large amateur telescopes), and Uranometria 2000.0 (332,000 stars to mag 9.75, and 10,300 deep-sky objects).
Read How to Use a Star Chart with a Telescope. It applies just as much to electronic charts on your phone or tablet — which many observers find handier and more versatile, if perhaps less well designed, than charts on paper.
You’ll also want a good deep-sky guidebook. A beloved old classic is the three-volume Burnham’s Celestial Handbook. It was my bedside reading for years. An impressive more modern one is the big Night Sky Observer’s Guide set (2+ volumes) by Kepple and Sanner. The pinnacle for total astro-geeks is the new Annals of the Deep Sky series, currently at 11 volumes as it works its way forward through the constellations alphabetically. So far it’s up to H.
Can computerized telescopes replace charts? Well, I used to say this:
“Not for beginners, I don’t think, unless you prefer spending your time getting finicky technology to work rather than learning how to explore through the sky yourself. As Terence Dickinson and Alan Dyer say in their Backyard Astronomer’s Guide, ‘A full appreciation of the universe cannot come without developing the skills to find things in the sky and understanding how the sky works. This knowledge comes only by spending time under the stars with star maps in hand and a curious mind.’ Without these, ‘the sky never becomes a friendly place.’ “
Well, things change. The technology has continued to improve and become more user-friendly — particularly with software that can now recognize any star field to determine exactly where the telescope is pointed — finally bypassing all aiming imperfections in the mount, tripod, gears, bearings and other mechanics, or in the user’s skill in setting up.
The latest revolution is the rise of small, imaging-only “smartscopes.” These take advantage of not only today’s pointing technology, but also the vastly better capabilities of imaging chips and processing compared to the human retina and visual cortex. The most sophisticated image stacking and processing can also come built in. The result is decent deep-sky imaging from shockingly small, low-priced units. The image may be viewable on your phone or computer as it builds up in real time. Small smartscopes can enable direct contributions to citizen-science projects.
These are changing the hobby at the entry level. For more on this revolution see Richard Wright’s “The Rise of the Smart Telescopes” in the November 2025 Sky & Telescope. And read the magazine’s review of this especially small one.
If you get a larger, more conventional computerized scope that allows direct visual use, make sure that its drives can be disengaged so you can swing it around and point it readily by hand when you want to, rather than only slowly by the electric motors (which eat batteries).
Audio sky tour. Out under the evening sky with your
earbuds in place, listen to Kelly Beatty’s monthly
podcast tour of the naked-eye heavens above. It’s free.
“The dangers of not thinking clearly are much greater now than ever before. It’s not that there’s something new in our way of thinking, it’s that credulous and confused thinking can be much more lethal in ways it was never before.”
— Carl Sagan, 1996
“Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”
— John Adams, 1770