The Sky This Week for February 24 to 26

The Sky This Week for February 24 to 26

A comet, visible star clusters, and other marvelous things to see in the sky this week.

By Richard Talcott
Friday, February 24

A pair of fine binocular objects shows up nicely on evenings this week. The open star clusters M46 and M47 reside about a degree apart in the northwestern corner of the constellation Puppis the Stern. The two lie about 12° east-northeast of the night sky’s brightest star, Sirius. The western cluster, M47, glows at 4th magnitude and appears as a fuzzy patch sprinkled with several pinpoint stars. Sixth-magnitude M46 shows up as a hazy collection of faint stars that is hard to resolve under most conditions. Although it contains nearly twice as many stars as M47, M46 appears fainter and fuzzier because it lies some three times farther from Earth.

Saturday, February 25

Asteroid 4 Vesta reached opposition and peak visibility in mid-January, but 2017’s brightest minor planet still shines at magnitude 7.0 and shows up easily through binoculars. To find the minor planet, start at magnitude 1.2 Pollux in northern Gemini and then drop 2.4° southwest to magnitude 4.1 Upsilon (u) Geminorum. Vesta lies 1.5° southwest of Upsilon this evening.

Sunday, February 26

New Moon occurs at 9:58 a.m. EST. At most New Moons, our satellite tracks across the sky with the Sun and remains hidden from view. But today, the alignment between the Moon and Sun is perfect and people in the right locales can view a solar eclipse. Observers across most of South America and southwestern Africa will see the Moon take at least a bite from the Sun. The best views, however, come along a narrow path that runs through southern Chile and Argentina before crossing the Atlantic and reaching the coast of Angola. People there will witness an annular eclipse. The Moon appears slightly smaller than the Sun in the sky, so observers along this central track will see a ring of sunlight surrounding the Moon. Because the eclipse is not total, people will need to use safe solar filters to view it directly.

Mars continues to put on a nice show these February evenings. It appears 25° high in the west once twilight fades to darkness, though it’s easier to find by looking 11° (about 1.5 binocular fields) to the upper left of brilliant Venus. The magnitude 1.3 Red Planet lies among the background stars of Pisces the Fish. Although this is normally a rather unremarkable region, it currently also hosts the distant planet Uranus. Mars passes just 34′ north of its 6th-magnitude neighbor this evening, and the two appear within 1° of each other both yesterday and tomorrow evenings. That’s close enough that both worlds appear within a single low-power telescopic field of view. Mars presents a 4.6″-diameter disk while Uranus, despite lying 10 times farther away, spans 3.4″. Neither object shows any detail, bit the ruddy color of Mars contrasts nicely with the blue-green of Uranus.

 

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Astronomy Magazine