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The winter sky is loaded with bright planets and stars, prominent constellations and interesting celestial sights, most of which are easily visible from your backyard.
But it can be tough to motivate yourself away from the warmth of your home.
Instant hand and feet warmers are great for this time of year, and they work for up to seven hours.
You can buy them at most sporting goods stores.
Once armed with your winter survival gear, check out Jupiter snuggled between the constellations Pisces and Aquarius.
It’s the brightest star-like object in the southwestern sky.
By the middle of the month, Jupiter descends to the horizon about 7:30 p.m., and it ducks out at month’s end.
Venus celebrates the second decade of our young century with a dazzling display in the eastern predawn sky.
It rises now before 1 a.m., and you can enjoy this luminous planet into the morning hours before the daily sun washes it out.
Saturn, in Virgo, is well up in the south at dawn.
If you have a small telescope, consider braving the early morning cold to get a glimpse of its rings, which now tilt nearly 10 degrees from horizontal to give the planet a deeper 3-D appearance.
A recent study suggests that the rings were formed by ice torn from a large moon as it spiraled down into Saturn.
If this “lost moon” idea is correct, it could help explain why the rings contain so much ice and so little rock, unlike other solar system bodies like meteors and comets.
One of the loveliest star clusters floats almost directly overhead in the evening sky this month.
The Pleiades, also known as the Seven Sisters, have long been considered a good test of visual acuity.
Although some sharp-eyed observers have reported seeing as many as 16 stars when observing under ideal conditions, most people do well to make out five or six.
Binoculars show the cluster in all its glory — dozens of brilliant stars scattered like diamond chips against a velvet sky.
The cluster, which consists of several hundred stars, is about 400 light-years from Earth.
The Pleiades are about 50 million years old, young by astronomical standards.
By the time the stars in the cluster flared into existence, the dinosaurs had been extinct for 15 million years.
In the east, the bright winter constellations are coming into their own.
Orion the Hunter dominates the season’s heavens.
Along the ecliptic, Orion is followed by Gemini, Cancer and Leo.
If you look toward the south about 6 p.m., Orion is the huge constellation in the south with an “H” shape.
The three bright stars that make up Orion’s belt are in a perfect row and very visible.
The right shoulder belongs to the star Betelgeuse, and the left foot is the star Rigel.
Betelgeuse is about 14 times the mass of our sun, and its radius reaches an astounding 2.8 astronomical units (or 2.8 times the distance between Earth and the sun).
If it were the center of our solar system, Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars would be toast.
To the lower left of Orion is Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky.
It hangs low in the south in Canis Major, the larger of Orion’s two hunting dogs.
January’s full moon arrives on the 19th.
It will be only two hours past perfect fullness when it rises and will shine all night.
Algonquin tribes called it the Wolf Moon, for the hungry howling of the wolves this time of year.
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Starwatch usually appears in the Peninsula Daily News the first Friday of every month.
