1. It's a quiet month, relatively, in the night sky. But with a little effort you can see the five brightest planets along with plenty of bright stars and deep-sky sights in the February sky. Here's what's going on in the Night Sky This Month.

 

(NOTE: And one more thing to watch for - the release of my annual course 'Fundamentals of Stargazing' later this month. Stay tuned!)

 

2. Our solar system was born in a place like this. And one day, some of what's left of our inner solar system will end up in a place like this. Here's a look at the Taurus Molecular Cloud, a dark but relatively nearby corner of the Local Arm where the Milky Way gets down to the business making new stars.

 

3. Check out these modern and quite beautiful images of the Milky Way made on black-and-white film by the amateur astronomer John Cormier. The great E. E. Barnard would have been proud to see these (though Barnard, were he alive today, would be shooting digital).

 

4. The bright star Castor in the constellation Gemini, a pretty enough double star in a small telescope. But it is in fact a complex six-star system that's nearly a "mini star cluster" in itself. Daniel Johnson at Sky and Telescope has a fine piece about this fascinating star.

 

5. A crash course in the six numbers that define the universe.

 

6. No promises, but the first comet detected in 2021 might just get bright enough to see with the naked eye by the end of the year.

 

7. What, exactly, did radio astronomers detect last year when they found a strong artificial signal coming from the direction of the nearest star, Proxima Centauri? Probably not alien life. But of all the places to look in the galaxy, and of all the places to visit, Proxima Cen might be not be a bad place to start.

 

8. Speaking of alien life, Elizabeth Kolbert at The New Yorker wonders if we've already been visited by aliens. As mentioned in this article, Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb thinks it is entirely possible the strange object Oumuamua that flew through the inner solar system last year was an artificially constructed object. (Loeb is no flake. He may have strong opinions, but he's a rigorously-trained and highly imaginative scientist with some 800 peer-reviewed publications to his credit).

 

9. And... a review of Loeb's new book about Oumuamua and the search for extraterrestrial life at this link.

 

10. A Song for Stargazers: The weather hasn't allowed for much stargazing in my part of the world the past few weeks. But clouds, yes, I've looked at clouds. Lots of clouds.

 

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Clear Skies!

 

Brian Ventrudo

Publisher