This Week’s Sky at a Glance, January 10 – 14
By: Alan MacRobert
Tuesday, January 10
• The Moon, nearly full, shines in the dim Club of Orion — with Betelgeuse to its lower right in early evening, Gemini’s Alhena closer to the Moon’s lower left, and Elnath in Taurus above it.
• Algol shines at minimum light, magnitude 3.4 instead of its usual 2.1, for a couple hours centered on 9:19 p.m. EST (6:19 p.m. PST).
Wednesday, January 11
• Full Moon tonight (exactly full at 6:34 a.m. Thursday morning EST). The Moon is in Gemini, with Castor and Pollux to its left and Procyon below or lower left of it.
Thursday, January 12
• Neptune is passing Venus. For North American observers they’ll appear closest this evening, about 0.4° apart, with Neptune to Venus’s lower left. Use high power to try to discern the nonstellar nature of its tiny disk, only 2.2 arcseconds wide. Venus is magnitude –4.5. Neptune, at magnitude 7.9, is about 100,000 times fainter!
• Jupiter is at western quadrature, 90° west of the Sun. So all this month, Jupiter’s western limb looks distinctly more shadowed in a telescope than its slightly more Sun-facing eastern limb.
Friday, January 13
• Here it is the coldest month of the year, but the “Summer Star,” Vega, is still barely hanging in there. Look for it twinkling over the northwest horizon during and shortly after nightfall. The farther north you are the higher it will be. If you’re too far south, it’s already gone.
Saturday, January 14
• The waning gibbous Moon shines near Regulus, after they rise around 8 p.m. Watch the distance between them increase through the night as the Moon moves east along its orbit.
Source
Witches Of The Craft® 