Celestial phenomena
What the starry sky offers in January
12/28/2024 – 7:12 a.mReading time: 4 min.
The starry sky in January offers numerous fascinating phenomena. Venus shines as an evening star, while Mars and Saturn offer further highlights.
Quadrantids, shooting stars and the full moon: In January, amateur astronomers can view numerous spectacles in the starry sky. We will explain to you when you should look up particularly carefully so as not to miss anything.
Soon after sunset in January, a bright planet lights up just above the western horizon: Venus, Earth’s inner neighbor planet. Venus opens the new year as an evening star and its shine surpasses all other stars – apart from the moon. Jupiter is also one of the bright planets of winter nights. The giant planet is in the constellation Taurus and is one of the highlights of the evening sky. Saturn can still be spotted in the evening sky far to the southwest. The much brighter Venus can then help to find Saturn in the darkness of the horizon.
In mid-January, Mars comes into opposition to the Sun in the constellation Gemini. This means that it can be viewed not only in the morning and evening as usual, but also throughout the night on January 16th. That night, the Sun, Earth and Mars are lined up in a chain in the sky. From January 18th to 26th, the red planet will pass the twin star Pollux. “It is now particularly close to us and therefore strikingly large and bright,” explains Björn Voss, astrophysicist and director of the Hamburg Planetarium. After Venus and Jupiter, Mars, Earth’s outer neighbor, is the third brightest planet and shines unmistakably.
Right at the beginning of the year, the ringed planet offers an interesting spectacle: Saturn will be covered by the waxing moon at around 6:30 p.m. on January 4th, which will show a narrow crescent. This can also be viewed with the naked eye. After about an hour, Saturn appears again behind the bright edge of the moon. The exact times of this cosmic spectacle depend on the location and vary by a few minutes.
In the first week of January, the Quadrantids bring sky watchers a number of shooting stars. The meteor shower is one of the three largest shooting star events of the year. Most meteors can be expected on the evening of January 3rd around 6 p.m. Up to a hundred shooting stars are said to flare up every hour. In some years over 200 meteors per hour were even counted. “We will see numerous shooting stars – especially in the morning hours,” says Björn Voss. The Quadrantids appear to flow from the constellation of the Boat, which is why they are also called the Bootids. Comet 96P/Machholz was identified as the origin of the stream.
The evening winter sky is rich in bright stars. You can see the bright chapel in the Fuhrmann almost at its zenith around 10 p.m. In the south, the sky hunter Orion takes its place with the bright stars Betelgeuse and Rigel. While the giant star Betelgeuse shines reddish, Rigel emits a bluish-white light.
The two dogs follow the sky hunter. In the Great Dog, Sirius sparkles intensely bluish white, while Procyon appears slightly yellowish in the Lesser Dog. High in the southeast you can see the twin stars with their two main stars Castor and Pollux. High in the west, Taurus takes its place with its bright, orange main star Aldebaran.
In Taurus, binocular observers will find the two prominent star clusters Pleiades and Hyades. They are also called the seven stars and the rain stars. The six bright stars Kapella, Aldebaran, Rigel, Sirius, Procyon and Pollux form the so-called winter hexagon, in a sense the counterpart to the summer triangle. The lion has already appeared low in the eastern sky, a harbinger of the coming spring. Its main star is called Regulus, which means little king.
The full moon phase occurs on January 13th at exactly 11:27 p.m. On the night of the full moon, the earth’s satellite is high in Gemini. The first full moon of the year is also called the “Wolf Moon”. The name is said to come from indigenous peoples in North America and refers to the increased howling of wolves at this time. On the 8th, the moon passes its closest orbit point to the Earth at a distance of 370,171 kilometers. New Moon occurs on the 29th at 1:36 p.m. On the night of the 13th to 14th, the full moon meets the bright neighboring planet Mars in the constellation Gemini with the brothers Kastor and Pollux – these are the names of the main twin stars.
During our winter the sun is closest to the earth. On January 4th, the Earth passes its closest orbital point to the Sun, the so-called perihelion. On this day the Sun is 147,105,780 kilometers away from Earth. Sunlight travels to Earth for eight minutes and ten seconds. On July 3rd, when Earth orbits far from the sun, sunlight will take seventeen seconds longer to reach us. On January 19th, at 9 p.m., the sun leaves the constellation Sagittarius and moves into the constellation Capricorn. At the same time she enters the zodiac sign of Aquarius. The sun’s midday height increases by almost six degrees and the day length increases by around an hour.