The Ellensburg, WA sky for the week of January 16, 2021

Saturday: How do you study the life cycle of a dog? Easy. Get a dog from the animal shelter, care for it for 15 years and study it. How do you study the life cycle of a star? Easy. Pick a star, watch it for a few billion years, and…. Wait a minute. Astronomers can’t observe something for a few billion years. Instead, they study stars that are at different points in their long life cycle and piece together the information from those different stars. What they do is like studying a one-year-old dog for a few minutes, then studying a different two-year-old dog for a few minutes, and so on. The sky in and near the constellation Orion provides an example of four objects at different points of star life.

First, find Rigel, the bright star in the lower right corner of the constellation Orion. This star, about 15 times the mass of the Sun, is rapidly burning its fuel for a high energy but short-lived existence, is exactly three and a half fists held upright and at arm’s length above due south at 9:30 p.m. About one fist up and to the left are the three objects of Orion’s sword holder. The middle “star” is really a star-forming region called the Orion nebula. It is illuminated by four baby stars each about 15 times the mass of the Sun. Betelgeuse, in the upper left corner of Orion, is a star at the end of its life. It started out life about 15 times the mass of the Sun. Finally, look about two fists to the right and one fist down from Rigel. You will be looking at a star that is about one tenth as bright as Rigel but still the brightest in its local region. The third star to the right of that star is called Epsilon Eridani, the most Sun-like close and bright star. 

Sunday: Tonight in Ellensburg, WA, the Sun sets at 4:44 p.m. Saturn sets at 5:10 p.m. and Jupiter sets at 5:26 p.m., making them a challenge to spot with the naked eye. Use binoculars and scan up from the horizon right after the Sun sets. DO NOT look at the Sun with binoculars or your naked eyes. Mercury will be easier to spot because it is still a half a fist above the southwestern horizon at 5:30, when the sky is getting dark.

Monday: Let’s review three important sets of three cats. There’s Josie, Valerie, and Melody of Josie and the Pussycats. Felix, Tom, and Sylvester from old time cartoons. And, if you want to get away from the mind-numbing effects of television, there’s Leo the lion, Leo Minor, and Lynx in the night sky. Leo is by far the most prominent of these three constellations. Its brightest star called Regulus is two and a half fists above the east-southeastern horizon at 10:00 p.m.. The backwards question mark-shaped head of Leo is above Regulus and the trapezoid-shaped body is to the left of it. Leo Minor consists of a few dim stars right above Leo. Pretty wimpy. The long dim constellation called Lynx spans from just above Leo Minor to nearly straight overhead. You and fellow stargazers won’t need to wear a long tail or ears for hats to enjoy these stellar cats.

Tuesday: In 1984, American singer Rockwell released the song “Somebody’s Watching Me”, backed up by Michael Jackson. In 2020, NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope released a picture of two bubbles of gas and dust that look like eyes watching you. Stare back at them by going to http://tiny.cc/n248tz. 

Wednesday: Mars is less than one fist above the Moon in the southwestern sky at 8:00 p.m. Uranus is the brightest object just to the lower left of Mars in a binocular field of view.

Thursday: You never see a giraffe on the ground in Ellensburg. But you can look for one every night in the sky. The constellation Camelopardalis the giraffe is circumpolar from Ellensburg’s latitude of 47 degrees north meaning it is always above the horizon. Don’t expect to be overwhelmed by the appearance of the stars in Camelopardalis. The brightest star in the constellation appears only about half as bright as the dimmest star in the Big Dipper. However, the actual luminosities of the three brightest stars in Camelopardalis are very high, each at least 3,000 times more luminous than the Sun. Alpha Camelopardalis, a mind boggling 600,000 times more luminous than the Sun, is seven fists above the northern horizon at 9:00 p.m.

Friday: Draco Malfoy makes an appearance in all seven books of the Harry Potter series. Perhaps you’ve heard of these. But, the constellation Draco the dragon makes an appearance in the sky every night. It is a circumpolar constellation as viewed from Ellensburg meaning it never goes below the horizon. The head of the dragon is one fist above due north at 9:30 p.m. Eltanin, the brightest star in the constellation, is at the lower left-hand corner of the trapezoid-shaped head of Draco.

The positional information in this column about stars and planets is typically accurate for the entire week. For up to date information about the night sky, go to https://nightsky.jpl.nasa.gov/planner.cfm.