A Winter wonderland above – December night sky
December nights, where the sky greets you like an icy cathedral of stars and wonder, and the nights draw darker earlier.
It is also the time of year where Santa takes flight with his reindeers. This year he will have quite the view with the constellations twinkling bright telling him their ancient stories, the Geminids shining beneath him like a shooting star runway and Jupiter glowing like a guiding beacon.
A few recommendations to get the best experience from this wonderful winter wonderland:
As winter sets in, the night air gets colder so wrap up warm and grab a hot drink before you gaze upon this celestial wonderland. As always allow your eyes around 20 minutes to adjust to the night sky. Try to keep phone use to a minimum as this will affect your eyes and may take longer for them to adjust. If you live in a busier city and you can travel, we recommend travelling a little bit further out to a location with less light pollution as light pollution affects our visibility of the night sky.
Now to start us off in this winter wonderland we have the final supermoon of the year known as the ‘Cold Moon’ which will appear on the 4th of December at 11:14pm GMT.
The name ‘Cold Moon’ does not mean the moon is colder or that it is any different, however due to very little cloud cover and the high trajectory of the moon in the December sky, its light can sometimes appear particularly bright and almost icy when reflected off frost or snow. It also has another name, the ‘Long Night Moon’ this is because it is near the winter solstice meaning it takes its highest trajectory across the sky and will stay above the horizon for a longer period than any other full moon of the year.
Image Credit: Heather Alexander AOP/Canva
The winter solstice marks the longest night of the year in the northern hemisphere. The moment when the sun sits lowest in the sky and takes it’s shortest path along the sky. When the Earths northern hemisphere drifts into darkness tilting farthest from the sun. However, the tilt of the earth never changes but it is due to the positioning of the tilt and the earths position. As can be seen in the image below. This will occur on the 21st of December this year.
Image Credit: Meniou/Wikipedia, CC BY-SA
The Geminid meteor shower is a fantastic event that will be best seen at its peak on December 13th & 14th, with excellent viewing conditions thanks to a waning crescent moon that won’t interfere with viewing unlike the Supermoon which would cast a moonlit glow across the sky.
The Geminids Meteor Shower. Image Credit: NASA
One Constellation that is very prominent in the night sky during December is Taurus (the bull zodiac constellation). It will rise high in the east in the early evening and pass overhead as the nights go on.
To help find Taurus you will need to find the three bright stars that form Orion’s Belt from the Orion constellation. Then you will draw an imaginary line upward and to the right through these three bright stars. The first bright red/orange star that you see with this imaginary line will be Aldebaran. Aldebaran marks the eye of the of the bull.
Image Credit: https://milwaukeeastro.org/Stargazing/oriontaurus.asp
One of the reasons Taurus is great to see during this wonderland of magic is because of it’s amazing asterism within it called ‘The Pleiades’ found to the west of Aldebaran. Just to note that an asterism is a star pattern within a constellation.
The Pleiades also known as the seven sisters due to Greek mythology, the daughters of Atlas and Pleione, who were transformed into doves by Zeus who then turned them into stars to escape the hunter Orion. As well as being an asterism The Pleiades are also an open star cluster that contains these seven bright stars along with more than 1,000 other stars. The seven stars are also visible with the naked eye.
Pleiades Star Cluster is thought to have formed 100 million years ago and are approximately 425 light years away. Credit: Davide De Martin & the ESA/ESO/NASA Photoshop FITS Liberator
We then have Santa’s guiding beacon, Jupiter. Jupiter dominates the December evening sky and will be visible all night right through till dawn rising from the eastern sky. It will also be visible in the constellation Taurus on December 4th and 5th and will easily outshine all the other stars.
Now this is only a taste of what this celestial wonderland has to offer! To see more why not come along to our 3pm ‘Our Night Sky’ show running Tuesday-Sunday where we will go into more detail about the Winter night sky and what secrets lie beyond.
0 Comments