Is it any wonder that stargazers love winter?
The nights are long and the skies are full of astronomical delights - bright planets, prominent constellations and beautiful star clusters.
Taurus, the celestial bull, charges through the night sky, one of the season's signature constellations.
It's easy to find in February - just face south an hour or two after sunset and look high above and to the right of Orion for a V-shaped cluster of stars with a bright orange star at one tip.
That "V" represents the head of the bull; the bright star, Aldebaran, represents its eye. Aldebaran, about 45 times bigger than our sun, is about 65 light-years away.
Taurus holds two brilliant star clusters: the Pleiades, also known as the Seven Sisters, and the Hyades (the V-shaped group). Each cluster is a fine sight with binoculars, which reveal dozens of fainter stars. Telescopes reveal a lot more stars, but because they narrow your field of view you lose the big-picture vistas that make the clusters so appealing in binoculars.
Imagine extending each arm of the "V" about 15 degrees to create bull horns. The northern horn leads to a fairly bright star called Alnath (Nath or El Nath on some star charts), about 130 light-years from Earth.
The star at the tip of the southern horn, about 8 degrees south-southeast of Alnath, is called zeta Tauri. It is about 420 light-years away.
One of the most interesting astronomical objects in the sky lies about 1 degree northwest of zeta Tauri, just off an imaginary line between it and Alnath. (Find a star chart at skymaps.com.) Although it's possible to catch a glimpse of the Crab Nebula with binoculars under excellent conditions, you'll want to examine this nebula with a telescope.
To most observers, the nebula appears as a ghostly, distinctly oval patch of light, with just a hint of structure. Long-exposure photos, like those taken with the Hubble Space Telescope, reveal an intricately detailed, cataclysmic explosion.
The nebula traces its history to July 4, 1054, when a brilliant new star suddenly appeared in the night sky. To get some idea of its appearance, take a look at Venus, which currently blazes in the southeast before sunrise, and imagine a star four or five times that bright suddenly appearing in the heavens.
Petroglyphs left by Ancestral Puebloans in the Four Corners area of the desert Southwest may represent the event, which was a supernova.
The nebula was discovered in 1731 by John Bevis, a physician and amateur astronomer, and independently re-discovered in 1758 by Charles Messier, the renowned 18th-century comet hunter.
A detailed drawing of the object made by Irish astronomer Lord Rosse in 1844 reminded some viewers of a crab, hence its name.
The Crab Nebula is about 6,300 light-years away (although estimates vary). Had it been nearby, say only 50 light-years away, astronomers believe radiation from the blast could have destroyed virtually all life on Earth.
Moon and planets
Jupiter appears to the left of a crescent moon in the western sky on the evening of Feb. 6.
Look for a crescent moon above and to the right of Venus before sunrise on Feb. 28.
On Feb. 7, 1984, astronaut Bruce McCandless II, testing NASA's Manned Maneuvering Unit, conducted the world's first untethered space walk. The photo of McCandless floating free in space, the blue and white curve of the Earth below him, quickly became one of the space program's most iconic images.
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