The month of February is named after Februa, which are the Roman rites of purification. We will reach the midpoint of winter this month on the second, which is Ground Hog Day. This is usually the coldest month of the year, but this has been an unusually warm winter so far.

There are several interesting highlights this month that will be worth making an effort to see and learn about. Comet Catalina is slowly fading out, but it will still be a good challenge to find in binoculars, as it follows a curving path just above the Big Dipper. Jupiter is close to its best and brightest for the year. All five of our brightest planets will be visible in the morning sky for the entire month, which is fairly rare. The last time this happened was in the evening sky 11 years ago, but they were all visible for less than a full month. Then the waning crescent moon will dramatically visit all five of these planets during the first week of this month.

The winter hexagon is now at its best for the year. Being able to locate and identify its brightest stars and learn their distances from Earth will tie them into our history and will greatly enrich your experience of the night sky in general, since that can be done for any and every star that you can see.

We will start at the top of this hexagon or winter circle as it is also sometimes called. That is a star named Capella in Auriga the Charioteer. You can think it as “cap on the sky”. It is 42 light years away and 10 times the diameter of our sun. That means the light you see this month from that star actually left there in 1974. That was well before home computers or the internet. Capella is a quadruple star system consisting of two large binary stars which are closer together than the earth-sun distance and two fainter red binary dwarf stars about one light year apart.

Now we will travel clockwise to the next bright star, which is Aldebaran in Taurus the Bull. This orange giant star is 65 light years away and 44 times larger than the sun. Its light left that source in 1951, only a few years after WWII ended. Not surprisingly, it also has a binary dwarf star orbiting around it. Aldebaran means “the follower” since it appears to follow the Pleiades across the sky.

Then we move on to Rigel, an incredible blue giant star that is over 50,000 times brighter than our sun and about 800 light years away. The light you currently see from this star carries much more history with it than any of the other stars in the Winter Hexagon. Its light left there around the year 1200 when the fourth of seven crusades on Earth was taking place and Genghis Khan just invaded China.

Now we move to the closest and brightest of these 8 stars. That is Sirius in Canis Major, only 8.8 light years away. Sirius is also a binary star; along with a white dwarf called Sirius B. Sirius A is only about twice as massive as the sun and is the brightest star in our entire sky at a magnitude of minus 1.4. Sirius B collapsed into a white dwarf from a red giant star about 120 million years ago, when the dinosaurs where roaming the earth in all their monstrous glory. It orbits Sirius A in a 50 year period and the distance between them varies from 8 to 31 astronomical units. It is now approaching its maximum separation, so you may be able to see it in an average telescope. Its light just left Sirius A in 2007, just before the last financial collapse.

Then we move to Procyon in Canis Minor. It is about 12 light years away. Its light left there in 2004, when a remarkable transit of Venus took place across the face of the sun which I was lucky enough to see along with the next transit in 2012. Procyon also has a white dwarf companion star that is about half the size of the earth.

Then we get to the last two stars in this circle. That is Castor and Pollux in Gemini. Castor, the mortal twin, is about 50 light years away, and Pollux, the immortal twin is an orange giant star about 34 light years away. This is actually a system of 6 stars that are all gravitationally bound together.

We can’t leave out the red supergiant star named Betelgeuse, which is roughly in the center of this great winter circle. This incredible star is about 1,000 times the diameter of the sun, which means that if you place it where our sun is in our solar system, it would extend all the way out to the orbit of Jupiter. Betelgeuse is also one of only a handful of visible stars that may not be there anymore since they are close to blowing up after they run out of fuel. At about 550 light years away, the light from Betelgeuse left there about the time that the printing press was invented on Earth in 1440 by Gutenberg. You could compare that great event to an intellectual big bang, launching us out of the dark ages as we began to access and share amazing new worlds of knowledge and letting machines do much of our work, which would free us up to pursue more creative endeavors.

All of the action on our present day earth is in the morning sky this month. Jupiter is up first, rising around 9 p.m. Then Mars rises around 1 a.m., then Saturn around 2:30 a.m., then Venus about 5:30 a.m. and finally Mercury about 6 a.m. So if you get up early with a clear view of the eastern horizon that is the order of our five brightest planets that you can see and follow all month long to notice their motions and changes in position and brightness.

The first three, Jupiter, Mars, and Saturn, are all getting closer and brighter and higher and the last two, Venus and Mercury are getting lower and dimmer as they speed on ahead of us in their faster orbits around the sun.

The red planet is gaining half a magnitude in brightness just this month. Notice that its orangegold color will become much more obvious this month and you should be able to see some of its surface features by next month as it approaches its May 22 opposition.

Feb.1: The last quarter moon is just above Mars this morning one hour before sunrise.

Feb. 3: The waning crescent moon is near Saturn and Antares in Scorpius this morning.

Feb. 4: Clyde Tombaugh was born on this day in 1906. He would discover Pluto on Feb. 18 in 1930. Now we just inferred the presence of a true, new ninth planet about the size of Neptune, but it takes 15,000 years to orbit the sun and it can be up to 25 times farther away than Pluto.

Feb. 6: The moon is just to the left of Venus and Mercury 45 minutes before sunrise.

Feb. 8: Jules Verne was born on this day in 1828. On this day in 1974, the last crew to occupy Skylab ended their 84-day mission. New moon is at 9:39 a.m. EST.

Feb. 11: The Japanese launched their first satellite on this day in 1970.

Feb. 14: Mercury and Venus are just 4 degrees apart for 10 days until the 18th.

Feb. 15: Galileo was born on this day in 1564. First quarter moon is at 2:46 a.m. The moon is near Aldebaran tonight. It will occult this star every month this year, visible from somewhere on Earth.

Feb. 19: Copernicus was born on this day in 1473. He first theorized that the sun is at the center of our solar system and that was later proven by Galileo.

Feb. 20: On this day in 1962 John Glenn became the first American to orbit the earth.

Feb. 21: On this day in 1931 the first liquid-fuel rocket was launched in Europe.

Feb. 22: Full moon is at 1:20 p.m. This is also known as the Snow or Hunger Moon.

Feb. 23: The moon passes just to the right of Jupiter tonight around 8 pm. Supernova 1987a in the Large Magellanic Cloud was found on this day by Ian Shelton, a Canadian astronomer.

Feb. 24: The first pulsar was discovered on this day in 1968 with a radio telescope.

— Bernie Reim is an amateur astronomer and teaches astronomy lab courses at the University of Southern Maine.

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