February 2025 Stargazing Guide

Greetings Junior Scientists, Scientists and citizens of this great big weird, wild and wonderful world in which we live. As always, I’m your humble science communicator, the great Orbax, coming to you from the Department of Physics at the University of Guelph and I’d like to welcome you to our February 2025 Star Gazing Guide.

With the vernal equinox in March, February marks our last full month of winter. And oh what a winter it’s been! But every day our daylight hours get longer with sunrise moving from 7:37 am on Feb 1 to 6:59 am by month’s end, and sunset going from 5:33 pm at the beginning of the month to 6:09 pm by the 28th leaving us with only 13 hours of dark skies to gaze into. And what should we look for? This month… the planetary parade persists, we learn what the term retrograde actually means, and we try to spot the Snow Moon through all this snow. All this and more if we just take some time… to look up.

Last month we talked about the planetary alignment taking place in our skies and dispelled a few myths that you may have heard in the media. Now while news outlets claim that January 21st was the best day for observing you probably noticed that those planets are still there after Sunset!

We've been incredibly lucky to have Mars, Jupiter, Venus and Saturn still visible to the unaided eye and if you have access to a modest telescope you may even be able to spot Uranus and Neptune. Now starting mid-month you'll be able to see Mercury following the Sun down to the horizon and it'll actually be visible near where the Sun has just set for about 30 minutes after sunset by the end of the month. During that window Mars, Jupiter and Venus will also be visible in the sky but Saturn will be making its way closer and closer to Mercury eventually disappearing below the horizon until it returns just before dawn in April.

So you've likely noticed the planets move in our sky relative to the stars and constellations over the course of weeks and months. This makes sense, right? We see the Sun rise and set every day along its path and the Moon travels consistently as well. Every once in a while though the planets will do something strange and they'll actually reverse their direction of travel appearing to move backwards.

This is called retrograde motion.

Retrograde just literally means backwards.

So how does this happen and why why would a planet just suddenly start moving backwards?

Well technically we call it apparent retrograde motion because this is just an illusion that occurs due to our perspective here on Earth. Okay if we picture the planets orbiting the Sun they all travel in the same direction with the closer planets moving faster than the more distant ones. To use an analogy many have used before, and for good reason, picture a race on a circular racetrack. We're Earth and our opponent is Mars, the planet of robots, and we've got at the faster inside track!

As we approach Mars, from our perspective, it appears to be moving forward but as we get closer to it

it starts to slow down and it even looks like it's moving backwards when we start to overtake it. That's apparent retrograde motion. Once we come around the bend and get far enough away from it Mars appears to return to its original movement again heading East in our Sky.

Now apparent retrograde motion occurs for all the planets in our solar system. Jupiter will end its retrograde motion on February 4th and Mars returns to its regular motion on February 23rd. Now you can imagine that before we understood the subtleties of orbital dynamics a planet suddenly changing its path of motion in the sky might be seen as an omen of doom or chaos approaching. A myth which has persisted to this day in some cases!

But fear not junior scientists, there's no scientific evidence that apparent retrograde motion has any effect on you whatsoever.

Our Full Moon this month is on February 12th. Settlers called this the Snow Moon (for obvious reasons) while the Mi'kmaw of the East coast call this the Snow-Blinding Moon, Apuknajit, marking the difficult weather often befalling this time of the year and in some stories referring to the low sun shining off the snow in the daytime hours. The Cree call the February Full Moon Kisipisim or the Great Moon while the Ojibwe call it Mkwa Giizis, the Bear Moon referring to the time of the year when bears have their cubs.

Well junior scientists I know that I'm getting this month's Star Gazing Guide later to you than normal but do you want to know why? Last week I was lucky enough to go to Hawaii and while I was there I made the journey up MaunaKea. MaunaKea is a dormant volcano almost 14000 feet above sea  level. That's halfway up Everest!

All right everybody we did it. We drove to the summit of MaunaKea. We're up here with the The Observatory arrays and we're at almost 14,000 ft above sea level!'

And it was there that I was able to visit the MaunaKea Observatories where scientists from 11 different nations study exoplanets, supermassive black holes and the origins of our Universe using 13 telescopes administered to by 10 independent nonprofit institutions. If you want to learn more about what they do check out the link below.

The skies that I saw in that protected portion of our planet were unlike any that I've seen in a long, long time. Layers upon layers of stars, nebulas and galaxies and it was all there waiting for me to just take some time... to look up.

See you next month junior scientists and don't forget to have a science-tastic day!

Special thanks to Royal City Science's own planetary geochemist Dr Glynis Perrett for her help preparing our Star Gazing Guide.

And the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada