The Ellensburg, WA sky for the week of January 17, 2026

Saturday: Winter is the best season for finding bright stars. And if you only want to set aside a few minutes, 10:00 p.m. tonight is a great time because the winter hexagon is due south. Starting at the bottom, find Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky, two and a half fists held upright and at arm’s length above the southern horizon. Going clockwise, Procyon (8^th brightest star in the night sky) is about two and a half fists to the upper left of Sirius. Pollux (17^th brightest) is about two and a half fists above Procyon (and right above the planet Mars). Capella (6^th brightest) is about two and a half fists to the upper right of Procyon and close to straight overhead. Going back to Sirius at the bottom, Rigel (7^th brightest) is about two and a half fists to the upper right of Sirius. Aldebaran (14^th brightest) is about three fists above Rigel (and right below the planet Jupiter). Adhara (22nd brightest) is a little more than a fist below Sirius and Castor (24^th brightest) is right above Pollux. Betelgeuse (10th brightest) is in the center of the hexagon, five fists above due south. That’s nine of the 24 brightest stars visible in the night sky congregated in one small section of the sky.

Sunday: Jupiter is three fists above the eastern horizon at 7:00 p.m.

Monday: This week is, on average, the coldest of the year so it is time to turn up the furnace. Fornax the furnace is one fist above due south at 7:00 p.m.

Tuesday: Wintertime weather in the northern USA can be crazy cold. Astronomers have recently discovered some brown dwarf stars have crazy hot weather. Brown dwarfs and small stars that are not massive enough to fuse hydrogen atoms and fuse hydrogen. But they are active enough to have a toxic chemical atmosphere that is as hot as a candle flame with clouds of hast moving silicate particles. Thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have the most detailed “weather map” of brown dwarfs ever. Read more about them at https://www.reuters.com/science/webb-telescope-reveals-wild-weather-cosmic-brown-dwarfs-2024-07-15/.

Wednesday: Do you ever take photos to spy on your neighbors? The Hubble Space Telescope does. In 2019, Hubble scientists released the best ever image of the Triangulum Galaxy, the second closest spiral galaxy to Earth. Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys weaved together 54 separate images to provide enough detail to see 10 million individual stars out of the estimated 40 billion stars in the galaxy. See the pictures at https://www.spacetelescope.org/news/heic1901/. At 8:00 p.m., the Triangulum Galaxy is six and a half fists above the southwestern horizon. It is barely visible with binoculars. First find the Great Square of Pegasus, centered four fists above the western horizon. It is tipped so it appears to be balanced on a corner. Go to the top star in the tilted square, called Alpheratz. Move your binoculars about one binocular field of view, about half a fist above the corner star. You’ll see a pair of stars of similar brightness in that field of view. Then move your binoculars up another field of view to two stars that are a little brighter and a little farther apart than the previous pair. The brighter of the two is named Mirach. About one binocular field of view, or about a half a fist to the right of Mirach is the largest galaxy in our neighborhood and the brightest in the sky: the Andromeda Galaxy. About one binocular field of view, or about a half a fist to the left of Mirach is the Triangulum Galaxy, also known as Messier 33 (M 33). The Triangulum is much more challenging to see with binoculars, which makes the Hubble image even more impressive.

Thursday: Saturn is about a fist to the upper left of the waxing crescent moon, about two fists above the west-southwestern horizon.

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. All times are Pacific Time unless noted.

The Ellensburg, WA sky for the week of January 10, 2026

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, rapidly burning its fuel for a high energy but short-lived existence, is three and a half fists held upright and at arm’s length above due south at 10:00 p.m. It was not, is not, and never will be like our Sun. However, 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. There you’ll find baby Suns. Now, look about two fists to the right and one fist down from Rigel. You should 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 Epsilon Eridani, the most Sun-like close and bright star. Betelgeuse, in the upper left corner of Orion, is a star at the end of its life that started out life larger than the Sun.

Sunday: Jupiter is in opposition tonight. That doesn’t mean Jupiter is fighting against an authoritarian leader. Opposition in this case means that Jupiter is on the opposite side of the Earth as the Sun. When an object is in opposition, it is at its highest point in the sky during the darkest time of the day. Thus, opposition is typically the best time to observe a planet. Jupiter is six and a half fists above due south at midnight. If you don’t want to stay up so late, you can see it three and a half fists above the eastern horizon at 8:00 p.m.

Monday: Most constellations don’t look like the object their name refers to. That’s because most constellations don’t have such a simple object to emulate as Triangulum does. Triangulum is shaped like a… wait for it…. wait for it…. A thin isosceles triangle. Metallah is the only mononymous star in the constellation. In Latin, this star is called Caput Trianguli, the head of the triangle. Triangulum is four and a half fists above due west at 10:00 p.m. The triangle is pointing straight down with Metallah at the bottom. The Triangulum Galaxy can be seen with binoculars about half a fist to the lower right of Metallah. This is the galaxy that the USS Enterprise travels to after the warp drive engine malfunctions in The Next Generation episode called “Where No One Has Gone Before”.

Tuesday: Saturn is three fists above the southwestern horizon at 7:00 p.m.

Wednesday: Antares is less than a half a fist to the left of the moon, one fist above the south-southeastern horizon at 7:00 a.m.

Thursday: Have you ever looked down on the ground and spotted a penny? In Yakima? While you were standing in Ellensburg? If you have, then you may be able to see the star Hamal as more than just a point of light. It has an angular diameter that can be directly measured from Earth. Hamal, the brightest star in the constellation Aries the ram, has the same angular diameter as a penny 37 miles away. (For comparison, the moon is about half the diameter of a penny held at arm’s length.) Hamal is three fists above due west at 11:00 p.m. Hamal is just to the left of Triangulum and is the brightest star in that region of the sky.

Friday: 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 due north at 9:00 p.m.
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. All times are Pacific Time unless noted.

The Ellensburg, WA sky for the week of January 3, 2026

Saturday: If the Sun looks big today, your eyes are not playing tricks on you. The Earth is at perihelion at 9:00 this morning. If you dig out your Greek language textbook, you’ll see that peri- means “in close proximity” and helios means “Sun.” So, perihelion is when an object is closest to the Sun in its orbit, about 1.5 million miles closer than its average distance of 93 million miles. Since it is winter in the Northern Hemisphere now, the seasonal temperature changes must not be caused by the Earth getting farther from and closer to the Sun. Otherwise, we’d have summer when the Earth is closest to the Sun. The seasons are caused by the angle of the sunlight hitting the Earth. In the winter, sunlight hits the Earth at a very low angle, an angle far from perpendicular or straight up and down. This means that a given “bundle” of sunlight is spread out over a large area and does not warm the surface as much as the same bundle in the summer. For the Northern Hemisphere, that very low angle occurs in December, January, and February.

This evening and tomorrow morning’s weather forecast: showers. Meteor showers, that is. The Quadrantid meteor shower peaks this evening. Meteor showers are named after the constellation from which the meteors appear to originate. That makes this shower mysterious because there isn’t any constellation with this name now. The shower was named after Quadrans Muralis, an obsolete constellation found in some early 19^th century star atlases. These meteors appear to come from a point in the modern constellation Draco the dragon. This point is about three fists above the northeastern horizon at 1:00 a.m. This year, the brightness of the Full Moon obscures the dimmer meteors.

Meteors are tiny rocks that hit the Earth and burn up in the atmosphere. Most meteors are associated with the path of a comet. This shower consists of debris from an asteroid discovered in 2003. Keeping with the comet-origin paradigm, astronomers think the asteroid is actually an “extinct” comet, a comet that lost all its ice as it passed by the Sun during its many orbits. For more information about the Quadrantid meteor shower, go to http://earthsky.org/?p=155137.

Sunday: Has it been tough to wake up this past week? It should have been because the sunrise has been getting a little later since summer started. I know. I know. December 21 was the shortest day of the year. But, because the Earth’s orbit around the Sun is elliptical and not circular, the Earth does not travel at a constant speed. It moves faster when it is closer to the Sun and slower when it is farther away. This leads to the latest sunrise occurring in late December/early January and the earliest sunset occurring in early December. Neither of these happen on the first day of winter. On the first day of winter, however, the interval between sunrise and sunset is the shortest, making it the shortest day of the year. For more information, go to http://goo.gl/SJC5r.

Monday: At 7:30 p.m., Saturn is three fists above due southwest and Jupiter is two and a half fists above the eastern horizon.

Tuesday: 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 fists above the eastern 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 close to straight overhead. You and fellow stargazers won’t need to wear a long tail or ears to enjoy these stellar cats.

Wednesday: 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 https://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/image/ssc2020-17a-something-out-there-is-watching-you.

Thursday: Now that you know meteors are rocks that burn up in the atmosphere, you will soon start to wonder what would happen if those rocks hit the surface of the Earth. Well, wonder no more. The browser-based app called Asteroid Launcher will simulate the collisions. You select the asteroid type, size, speed, and angle of impact. The most common impactor material is stone and the typical speed is 40,000 miles per hour, in case you want to introduce some realism into your simulation. Go to https://neal.fun/asteroid-launcher/, click on the map where you want the asteroid to land and then launch your virtual asteroid.

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 10:30 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. All times are Pacific Time unless noted.