STARGAZING

To enjoy Methow winter nights, look up

BY DAVID WARD

Winter brings the clearest skies, lots of sparkling stars, and no smoke to obscure our view of the infinite cosmos above. Cold air holds very little moisture, so the sky is more transparent in the colder months making the stars brighter.

In the winter season, our view of the universe is looking away from the center of our Milky Way galaxy and the hazy glow of the billions of stars that reside there, so the stars we can see are even brighter.

A little bit of planning will make for a more enjoyable outing into the outside at night. First of all, pick a clear night without a bright moon washing out the fainter stars. Dress warmly, because stargazing is not an aerobic activity and you cannot expect to warm up out there standing around in the snow. A thermos of hot tea might take your mind off of how cold you are. Above all else, get as far away as you can from those annoying Christmas lights. The subtleties of the night sky cannot compete with Rudolf’s blinking red nose.

Looking up into a dark sky filled with a myriad of stars can be so confusing that it is difficult to pick out the constellations, so let’s start with something easy. Orion is probably the most familiar constellation up there. You will find it somewhere in the south. Straddling the celestial equator, there is no place on earth where it is not visible. In the middle of the star grouping, three

bright evenly spaced stars stand out in an almost perfectly straight line, the belt of Orion. There is nothing else in the sky quite like it. Four stars, two quite bright and two a little dimmer, form a large rectangle around the belt.

Line up the three belt stars and point down and to the left to find Sirius, the brightest star in the sky. It will be visible about mid to late winter or sooner if you stay up later. Is it bright because it is close to us or is it a really bright star? Turns out it is close, the nearest star we can easily see at only 8.6 light years distant or about 51 trillion miles. Sound like a long way? Yeah, it is. It would take about 10 million years to get there in a passenger jet. Better take a few snacks along and a book to read for the ride.

TIME TRAVEL

When we are looking at the stars we are not only looking a long distance in space but also back in time. Think about what you were doing eight and a half years ago, and that is when the light you see now left Sirius. Back to Orion. See the star at the lower right corner of that rectangle? That is Rigel, and it is 864 light years away, which means you are looking back to when the Crusade wars were being fought on the other side of the world. The middle star in the belt, Alnilam, is much further yet. That light left its source about the time of Jesus.

I think you get the point, the stars are very far away. Here are a few other things to see in the night sky. Look above and to the right of Orion for the distinctive but dim “V” of Taurus, the bull. The slightly reddish brighter star in the “V” is Aldebaran, the angry red eye of the bull. Northeast of Orion look for two almost equally bright stars, Castor and Pollux, the Gemini twins.

Want to go deeper into the sky? Grab a pair of binoculars and look for these gems way out in the depths of space. An easy target is the Great Nebula of Orion, a star forming cloud still making “baby” stars today. Look just below the belt of Orion for his sword, three dimmer stars in a row. Binoculars will show one of those stars to be fuzzy, a giant glob of hydrogen gas tens of thousands of times larger than our solar system.

A more challenging target is the Andromeda galaxy, the farthest and biggest thing the naked eye can see. Find the “W” of Cassiopeia in the northwest and use it as a pointer to a whole different galaxy. If you do spot its fuzzy glow, you are seeing light that left that galaxy two and a half million years ago.

What about the planets? Venus will be visible late fall and early winter, low in the southwest just after sunset. Later in January, see if you can spot it low in the southeast just before sunrise. A small telescope will show it as a tiny crescent. It and Mercury are the only two planets that go through phases like the moon because they orbit the sun between the sun and us.

Jupiter and Saturn can be seen in the early evening in the southwest most of the winter. Jupiter is the brightest of the two a couple of fist-widths east of Saturn. A small telescope will show you four of Jupiter’s moons and of course Saturn’s graceful rings.

Enjoy the best season for star gazing and stay warm out there.

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