SUNSET: 
0FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 13
After sunset, watch the bright twilight low in the west-southwest for Mercury, magnitude –1, and extremely low Venus, magnitude –3.9, as shown below. Venus is barely beginning its evening apparition of 2026. This evening, Venus and Mercury are 8° apart.
Saturn, much dimmer, comes into view later in twilight.
■ Orion stands his highest in the south by about 8 p.m., probably looking smaller than you'll remember him appearing early in the winter when he was low. You're seeing the "Moon illusion" effect. Constellations, not just the Moon, look bigger when they're low.
■ After dinnertime Sirius the Dog Star, the brightest star of Canis Major, blazes in the southeast. Look lower left of Orion.
In a dark sky with lots of stars, Canis Major's points can be connected to form a convincing dog seen in profile. He's currently standing on his hind legs, facing right. Sirius shines on his chest like a dogtag, to the right or lower right of his faint, triangular head, as shown below.
But through the light pollution where most of us live, only the five brightest stars of Canis Major are easily visible. These form the Meat Cleaver. Sirius is the cleaver's top back corner. Its blade faces right (from Beta, β, to Epsilon, ε), and its short handle points lower left (ending in Eta, η).
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 14
■ Below Orion and to the right of Sirius hides Lepus the Hare. Like Canis Major, this is a constellation with a connect-the-dots that really looks like what it's supposed to be. He's a crouching bunny, with his nose pointing lower right, his faint ears extending up toward Rigel (Orion's brighter foot), and his body bunched to the left. His brightest two stars, 3rd-magnitude Alpha and Beta Leporis, form the back and front of his neck, as shown below.
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 15
■ A fast-creeping red dwarf. Have you ever seen a red dwarf star? These are the most common stars in space, but they're so intrinsically dim that not one of them is among the 6,000 pinpoints visible to the naked eye on even the darkest nights. One of the nearest and brightest red dwarfs lies just 3° west of Procyon, nicely placed these winter evenings. It's Luyten's Star, also known as GJ 273, and at visual magnitude 9.9 it's in range of small to medium telescopes. Use the finder charts with Bob King's article Catch Luyten's Star.
This humble object is very close to us as stars go, only 12.3 light-years away, so it's also a high proper motion star; it creeps across its starry backdrop by 3.7 arcseconds per year. This means that a careful visual telescope user might detect its motion in as little as about 3 years, writes King, "depending on its proximity to field stars and the making and breaking of distinctive alignments with other stars." He suggests, "Make an initial observation, note the position in a sketch, map or photo, and then return a couple years later. Hey, no hurry."
To locate and identify Luyten's Star with King's charts you'll need to be good at telescopic star-hopping. This is an essential skill for any amateur astronomer to develop so you don't get lost in space. See How to Use a Star Chart with a Telescope, and expect a certain amount of frustration at first. Everyone goes through this. Don't give up.
MONDAY, FEBRUARY 16
■ High in the northern sky these evenings, in the seemingly empty wastes between Capella overhead and Polaris due north, sprawls big, dim Camelopardalis, the Giraffe — perhaps the biggest often-visible constellation you don't know. Unless you have a good dark sky, you'll need binoculars to work out its large, nondescript pattern using the constellation chart in the center of Sky & Telescope — a challenge project that will build your skills for correctly relating what you see in binoculars to what you see, much smaller, on a sky map.
If you're new at this, start with brighter, easier constellations and save the shy Giraffe until you get good at it.
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 17
■ Right after night is completely dark this week, the W of Cassiopeia shines high in the northwest, standing on end. And near the zenith is Capella.
The brightest star about midway between Cassiopeia and Capella (and a little off to the left as you face Cassiopeia) is Alpha Persei, magnitude 1.8. It lies on the lower-right edge of the Alpha Persei Cluster: a large, elongated, very loose swarm of fainter stars about the size of your thumbprint at arm's length. At least a dozen are 6th magnitude or brighter, bright enough to show quite well in binoculars.
Alpha Per, a white supergiant, is a true member of the group and is its brightest light. It and the rest are about 570 light-years away.
■ New Moon (exact at 7:01 a.m. EST). An annular eclipse of the Sun occurs for parts of Antarctica. A slight partial eclipse occurs for parts of southern Africa and the southern tip of South America. Map and details.
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 18
■ A hairline Moon occults Mercury very low in twilight for a select region of the southeastern U.S. and Central America. Elsewhere throughout the Americas, the 1½-day-old Moon has a lovely close conjunction with Mercury. You may need binoculars or a wide-field telescope to pick up the pair low in the fading twilight. They'll be a bit left of due west. Mercury will be a bright magnitude –0.6. The Moon will be a mere 2 or 3 percent sunlit and full of ghostly earthshine.
Venus will be 7° or 8° below them. Saturn, much fainter, will be about 12° above them and perhaps a bit left depending on your location. See the illustration below.
As for the occultation, here are map and timetables. The first two tables, with predictions for many U.S. locations, are long. The first table gives the times of Mercury's disappearance behind the Moon's dark, though earthlit, limb. The second table gives Mercury's reappearance times out from behind the Moon's very thin bright limb. Scroll to be sure you're using the correct table; watch for the new heading as you scroll down. The times are in UT (GMT) February 18th. UT is 5 hours ahead of Eastern Standard Time, 6 hours ahead of CST, 7 ahead of MST, and 8 ahead of PST.
For instance: Use the first table to see that for New Orleans, Mercury disappears on the Moon's earthlit limb at 6:36 p.m. February 18th CST, when the Moon is still 8° high in the west. The Moon will set for New Orleans while Mercury is still behind it.
Unlike a star, Mercury will take several seconds to fade and disappear. It's not a point but a half-lit disk 7 arcseconds from end to end.
See more at Bob King's Watch the Young Moon Greet Mercury at Sunset.
■ Later Wednesday night, slow-moving Ganymede exits Jupiter's face at 8:39 p.m. EST to float free in the dark. Then at 8:58 EST, Ganymede's little black shadow enters the opposite side of Jupiter's face. The shadow continues its slow transit across the planet until 12:15 a.m. EST (9:15 p.m. PST).
For this month's complete listings of Jupiter's satellite events and Red Spot transit times, good worldwide, see the February Sky & Telescope, page 51.
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 19
Kemble's Cascade awaits your binoculars very high in the north-northwest these dark evenings. This is a dim but fairly famous asterism, a straight star chain 2¼° long named in 1980 for its pointer-outer Fr. Lucian Kemble of Canada. But it's located in dim, sprawling, shapeless Camelopardalis the Giraffe, difficult to navigate.
So here's a shortcut. Draw a line from Algol through Alpha Persei. Extend the line farther on by 1½ times that length. You're now very close to one end of the chain, a pair of stars magnitudes 6.8 and 6.2 a third of a degree apart.
The Cascade currently hangs down from the left one of those two stars (the fainter one) in early evening. Most of its 15 or so other members are 7th to 9th magnitude, so you'll need a dark sky. Averted vision helps, as always for faint sights.
Celestial north, the direction toward Polaris, is to the right. This frame is 3° tall, roughly half the width of a typical binocular's field of view. Image by Greg Parker and Noel Carboni
Left of its bottom end is a gentle arc of three brighter stars, mag 4.8 to 5.8, as seen in the photo above. These, combined with the mag-4.9 star near the middle of the Cascade, make a good finding aid.
Bonus for telescopes: That 6.2-mag star 1/3° to the right of the Cascade's top is the brightest of the sparse, small open cluster NGC 1502, only about 0.1° wide. Its next-brightest dozen stars are 9th and 10th magnitude.
And that 6.2-mag star, near its the cluster's center, is a wide telescopic double. Its components are nearly twins: mags 7.0 and 7.1, a nice 17 arcseconds apart.
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 20
■ By 8 or 9 p.m. the Big Dipper stands on its handle in the northeast. In the northwest, Cassiopeia also stands on end (its brighter end) at about the same height. Between them is Polaris, about as bright as most of the Big Dipper's stars.
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 21
■ Have you ever seen Canopus, the second-brightest star after Sirius? As it happens, Canopus lies almost due south of Sirius: by 36°. That's far enough south that it never appears above your horizon unless you're below latitude 37° N (southern Virginia, southern Missouri, central California). And near there you'll need a very flat south horizon. Canopus crosses the south point on the horizon just 21 minutes before Sirius does.
So, when to look? Canopus is exactly due south when Beta Canis Majoris — Mirzam the Announcer, the 2nd-magniude star about three finger-widths to the right of Sirius — is at its highest due south over your landscape. That's about 8 p.m. now, depending on how far east or west you are in your time zone. Drop straight down from Mirzam then.
■ Algol should be at its minimum brightness, magnitude 3.4 instead of its usual 2.1, for a couple hours centered on 9:22 p.m. EST.
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 22
■ The thick crescent Moon shines below the Pleiades after dark. It's a lesser distance upper left of the two or three brightest stars of Aries (for North America).
■ Certain deep-sky objects hold secret surprises within or near them. Get out your telescope and sky atlas for a go at Bob King's eight Hidden Gems in Common Deep-Sky Objects now in evening view.
This Week's Planet Roundup
Mercury glimmers low in the west in mid-twilight, perhaps best seen about 45 minutes after sunset. Mercury is still brighter than its average, though it's fading: from magnitude –0.9 on Friday the 13th to –0.2 on Friday the 20th. That's a loss of half its brightness.
See Mercury's encounter with the hairline crescent Moon in the February 18 entry above.
Venus, down below Mercury, is much brighter at magnitude –3.9. But it has to with contend with worse horizon obstructions and more atmospheric extinction. Venus can be found 7° or 8° below Mercury all week. Telescopically Venus is a little round disk just 7 arcseconds wide; it's on the far side of the Sun from us. In the terrible telescopic seeing near the horizon it may seem like hardly more than a super-bright, blobby star even at high power.
Mars is out of sight behind the glare of the Sun.
Jupiter (magnitude –2.6) shines in the middle of Gemini, glaring nearly overhead toward the south in early evening. In a telescope it's still 45 or 44 arcseconds wide. See "Jupiter Rules!" in the January Sky & Telescope, page 48, with a map of its dark belts and bright zones.
Jupiter's cloudtops always appear less bright toward the limb, making a bright-surfaced satellite like Europa stand out more distinctly when it's near the beginnings and ends of its transits.
Saturn (magnitude +1.1, in Pisces) is in the west-southwest at dusk. In twilight it's upper left of brighter Mercury and, after dark, lower left of the Great Square of Pegasus. Saturn sets about an hour after full dark.
In a telescope Saturn's rings are still very thin but gradually opening up, now tilted 2° or 3° to our line of sight. The rings' thin black shadow on Saturn's globe is slowly widening too. But the telescopic seeing so low will be very poor! Get your telescope on Saturn as early in twilight as you can find it naked-eye.
Uranus (magnitude 5.7, in Taurus 5° south of the Pleiades) is high in the southwest these evenings. At high power in a telescope it's a tiny but non-stellar dot, 3.6 arcseconds wide. You'll need a detailed finder chart to identify it among similar-looking faint stars, such as the chart in last November's Sky & Telescope, page 49.
Neptune is magnitude 7.9 near sinking Saturn. You'll need an even better chart than for Uranus.
All descriptions that relate to your horizon — including the words up, down, right, and left — are written for the world's mid-northern latitudes. Descriptions and graphics that also depend on longitude (mainly Moon positions) are for North America. Eastern Standard Time (EST) is Universal Time minus 5 hours. UT is also known as UTC, GMT, or Z time.
Want to become a better astronomer? Learn your way around the constellations. They're the key to locating everything fainter and deeper to hunt with binoculars or a telescope.
This is an outdoor nature hobby. For a more detailed constellation guide covering the whole evening sky, use the big monthly map in the center of each issue of Sky & Telescope, the essential magazine of astronomy.
For the attitude every amateur astronomer needs, read Jennifer Willis's Modest Expectations Give Rise to Delight.
Once you get a telescope, to put it to good use you'll want a much more detailed, large-scale sky atlas (set of charts). The basic standard is the Pocket Sky Atlas, in either the original or Jumbo Edition. Both show all 30,000 stars to magnitude 7.6, and 1,500 deep-sky targets — star clusters, nebulae, and galaxies — to search out among them.
Next up is the larger and deeper Sky Atlas 2000.0, plotting stars to magnitude 8.5; nearly three times as many, as well as many more deep-sky objects. It's currently out of print, but maybe you can find one used.
The next up, once you know your way around well, are the even larger Interstellarum Deep-Sky Atlas (with 201,000+ stars to magnitude 9.5 and 14,000 deep-sky objects selected to be detectable by eye in very large amateur telescopes), and Uranometria 2000.0 (332,000 stars to mag 9.75, and 10,300 deep-sky objects).
Read How to Use a Star Chart with a Telescope. It applies just as much to electronic charts on your phone or tablet — which many observers find handier and more versatile, if sometimes less well designed, than charts on paper.
You'll also want a good deep-sky guidebook. A beloved old classic is the three-volume Burnham's Celestial Handbook. It was my bedside reading for years. An impressive more modern one is the big Night Sky Observer's Guide set (2+ volumes) by Kepple and Sanner. The pinnacle for total astro-geeks is the new Annals of the Deep Sky series, currently at 11 volumes as it works its way forward through the constellations alphabetically. So far it's up to H.
Can computerized telescopes replace charts? Well, I used to say this:
"Not for beginners, I don't think, unless you prefer spending your time getting finicky technology to work rather than learning how to explore through the sky yourself. As Terence Dickinson and Alan Dyer say in their Backyard Astronomer's Guide, 'A full appreciation of the universe cannot come without developing the skills to find things in the sky and understanding how the sky works. This knowledge comes only by spending time under the stars with star maps in hand and a curious mind.' Without these, 'the sky never becomes a friendly place.' "
But, things change. The technology has continued to improve and become more user-friendly — particularly with software that can now recognize any star field to determine exactly where the telescope is pointed — finally bypassing all aiming imperfections in the mount, tripod, gears, bearings and other mechanics, or in the user's skill in setting up.
The latest revolution is the rise of small, imaging-only "smartscopes." These take advantage of not only today's pointing technology, but also the vastly better capabilities of imaging chips and image processing compared to the human retina and visual cortex. The most sophisticated image stacking and processing can also come built right in. The result is decent deep-sky imaging from shockingly small, low-priced units. The image may be viewable on your phone or computer as it builds up in real time. Some can directly enable contributions to citizen-science projects.
Smartscopes are changing the hobby at the entry level. For more on this revolution see Richard Wright's "The Rise of the Smart Telescopes" in the November 2025 Sky & Telescope. And read the magazine's review of this especially small one.
If you get a larger, more conventional computerized scope that allows direct visual use, make sure that its drives can be disengaged so you can swing it around and point it readily by hand when you want to, rather than only slowly by the electric motors (which eat batteries).
Audio sky tour. Out under the evening sky with your
earbuds in place, listen to Kelly Beatty's monthly
podcast tour of the naked-eye heavens above. It's free.
"The dangers of not thinking clearly are much greater now than ever before. It's not that there's something new in our way of thinking, it's that credulous and confused thinking can be much more lethal in ways it was never before."
— Carl Sagan, 1996
"Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence."
— John Adams, 1770
About Alan MacRobert
Alan M. MacRobert became an avid Sky & Telescope subscriber in 1966 at age 14, joined the editorial staff in 1982, and is now a senior contributing editor, semi-retired. He played a role in practically every part of the magazine and the company's other products for more than a generation, both on the amateur-observing side and the science-reporting side. In 1994 a book collection of his observing how-tos and telescopic sky tours was published as Star Hopping for Backyard Astronomers. He has produced This Week's Sky at a Glance online every week since 1989.
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