After clouds keep us indoors tonight, a beautiful week for stargazing lies ahead.
The biggest event of this week will be the full snow moon.
This year’s full Snow Moon will occur on Wednesday, February 16 at 11:56AM. Obviously the moon won’t be visible when it is precisely full, but it will appear that way both Tuesday and Wednesday nights when 99% of the surface will be illuminated. The Snow Moon is named after, you guessed it, the snow common in the Northern Hemisphere during the month of February. Interestingly, and not surprisingly, different Native American tribes had different names for this full moon. The Cree call this the “Bald Eagle Moon” and the Dakota call it the “Racoon Moon”. The local Cherokee call this full moon the “Hungry Moon” or “Month of the Bony Moon”, due to the scarcity of food this time of year.
While the Moon will be washing out most good telescope objects this week, that doesn’t mean there aren’t things to see. Mercury reaches it’s best visibility for the next few months this week when it will be 26 angular degrees from the sun. You can find it in the pre-dawn sky down and left of Venus. If you view Mercury through a large telescope it will appear just over half full.
Speaking of Venus, it remains incredibly bright in the morning sky. While not quite bright enough to cast shadows, you would certainly think it could when viewing it before sunrise. It is near its maximum possible brightness this week though it will gradually dim slightly over the coming months.
Another great pre-dawn item this week will be the International Space Station. Last week we saw several great evening passes, but this week it will shift to primarily morning visibility. I’ve listed these passes below. The best one will come on Monday with several harder-to-view but still bright passes on Tuesday and Wednesday. You can see two consecutive passes on Tuesday morning when the orbit lines up just right to be visible twice, once in the east and once in the west.
Monday: 5:40-5:43AM; magnitude -3.3 (very bright) 49 degrees high in the NW
Tuesday: 4:54-4:55AM; magnitude -0.2 (bright) 15 degrees high in the NE
6:27-6:21AM; magnitude -2.3 (very bright) 13 degrees high in the NW
Wednesday: 5:41-5:43AM; magnitude -2.3 (very bright) 18 degrees high in the N
Have a great week and, as always, watch the skies!
