The three brightest stars in the sky (both hemispheres) are now in our east and south at night. The brightest is Sirius, the dog star, which follows the upside down constellation of Orion the Hunter from the eastern horizon across the north. Orion's belt and sword form the right-side-up Pot or Saucepan. Sirius is in the collar of Orion’s large hunting dog, Canis Major, also upside down. Sirius is much brighter than Alpha Centauri, which is the third brightest star and also the closest star to us. Both are multiple star systems. Alpha Centauri can be found as the brighter of the two pointers to the Southern Cross, low in the southern sky. As well as appearing much brighter in our sky, Sirius is also twice as far away from us as Alpha Centauri. Astonishing, however, is the second brightest star in the sky, Canopus, which is more than 70 times farther away than Alpha Centauri! Canopus can be found east of south at the top of a large triangle made with Sirius to the left and Alpha Centauri farther away to the right.

Jupiter remains bright in our night sky, setting in the west around 1am by the end of the month. Rising in the east around 2am at the beginning of the month you may see Mars. Rising earlier each night throughout the month, orange Mars will also be getting brighter. At the end of the month, if you are still up a couple of hours later, you will see Saturn, with its slightly golden hue, rising in the eastern pre-dawn sky. Then Venus will rise less than half an hour before the Sun, visible low in the eastern sky.

M31, better known as the Andromeda Galaxy, is visible low in the north as a small faint fuzzy smudge. The reference M31 means that it is the 31st object cataloged by Charles Messier, a Frenchman who was interested in the fuzzy nebulous objects in the sky and began a list of them, first published in 1774. M31 is the first object ever resolved to be outside of our galaxy. Edwin Hubble used the then largest telescope in the world, 2¹/₂ metres diameter, in 1919 to determine that Andromeda was about a million light years away from us, putting it well outside the confines of our own galaxy. Later, in 1950, he used the 200-inch / 5-metre Hale telescope at Mount Palomar in California (the largest in the world until 1947) to refine and correct his figures. Andromeda Galaxy was more than twice as far away as he had originally reported.

On the 7th NASA announced the discovery by its Spitzer Space Telescope (infrared) of a truly enormous ring of dust around Saturn. It surrounds Saturn's small moon Phoebe which orbits Saturn at 13 million kilometers, and like the moon, orbits in the opposite direction from the other rings and most of Saturn's other moons. The newly discovered ring extends from about 6 million to 18 million kilometers from the planet and is tilted 27 degrees from the plane of the main rings. If it was visible to us with our naked eyes it would span approximately the width of two full moons around the distant planet with its familiar ring system.

Then, on the 9th, NASA crashed a rocket and its LCROSS spacecraft into a small crater in the moon's southern hemisphere. The crater is always in shadow, hence is very cold, and is suspected to harbour water ice in its soils. Two instruments, one Russian and one US, are carried on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and will observe the debris plume resulting from the impact. With the data sent back scientists expect to be able to confirm the presence or absence of water. Several Earth-based telescopes were also trained on the moon recording the event.

This day, 52 years ago, was an important milestone in the human story and is known as the Dawn of the Space Age. I take the liberty of quoting NASA: "History changed on October 4, 1957, when the Soviet Union successfully launched Sputnik I. The world's first artificial satellite was about the size of a beach ball (58 cm.or 22.8 inches in diameter), weighed only 83.6 kg. or 183.9 pounds, and took about 98 minutes to orbit the Earth on its elliptical path." A new political, military, technological, and scientific era was ushered in that day, and it was the beginning of the cold war space race.

Earth will overtake Eris in its 557-year orbit around the Sun. Eris is a larger ice ball than Pluto and its wildly eccentric orbit carries it and its one known moon, Dysnomia, nearly twice as far from the Sun as Pluto. This year Eris is close to the outer reaches of its orbit, almost 100 times farther from the Sun than Earth. In around 2256 it will reach the closest part of its orbit, well inside the orbit of Pluto.

While our gravity is not as attractive as Jupiter's, it is really just a matter of being at the right place at the right time to intercept one of these interplanetary travelers, an opportunity we are striving to miss. One of the projects of Alan Gilmore and Pam Kilmartin at Lake Tekapo's Mt John Observatory is tracking such objects as near Earth asteroids. The main objective is to identify a threat in enough time to take measures to avoid it. A collision with an object the size of the one that hit Jupiter in July would have serious consequences for our planet.

ust 7 years later, on this same date, the Viking 1 lander set down on Mars, beginning its 6-year and almost 4-month investigations. The mission of the two Viking landers was nothing less than the study of the biology (if any), chemical composition, meteorology, seismology, magnetic and other physical properties and appearance of the Martian surface and atmosphere.

We will lose an hour and 10 minutes of daylight between the beginning and end of February.