Winter stargazing, in my opinion, is simply the best in eastern Pennsylvania. I do some my best stargazing, telescoping and celestial photography in January. There's so much beauty in the heavens this time of year, but there's also so much cold. Dress for the cold because it is so worth it. Have a big thermos of something warm with you if you're out for an extended night making the stars your old friends. One of my best weapons against the cold are those instant chemical heat hand and feet warmers that work 7 to 8 hours. Put those magic little bags of heat in your gloves and boots and you're good to go. You can buy them at most sporting goods stores and hardware stores.
Once armed with your winter survival gear, get out and enjoy the best stargazing of the year. You'll notice that the eastern half of the sky has many more bright stars than the west. Over the last couple of months, the last of the summer constellations have slowly sunk lower and lower in the west and now they are gone, not to be seen again in the evenings until next June. They, of course, didn't move, but we did. While Earth continues its annual circuit around the sun, the nighttime side has now turned away from the stars of summer.
The dominant constellation of autumn, Pegasus the giant winged horse, is still hanging in there in the west. Look for the distinct great square, actually a tilted rectangle that makes up the torso of the mighty flying horse. With a good pair of binoculars or a small telescope, scan about halfway between the Pegasus and the bright "W" that makes up the constellation Cassiopeia the Queen, and see if you can spot the Andromeda Galaxy. It's our Milky Way galaxy's next-door neighbor. All you'll really see is a faint little smudge, but that little smudge is a whole other galaxy, one and a half times the size of our own, more than two million light-years away. If you're new to astronomy, one light-year equals almost six trillion miles.
The eastern sky is still lit up like a Christmas tree. There are many bright stars and constellations, and this winter the bright planet Jupiter is among them and the brightest shiner of them all. I call this part of the heavens "Orion and his gang," with the mighty constellation Orion the Hunter in the middle of them all. The mighty hunter looks like a sideways bowtie rising diagonally in the southeastern sky. What really jumps out at you are the three bright stars in a perfect row that make up Orion's belt. There's also the bright star Rigel, at Orion's knee, and Betelgeuse, at his armpit. By the way, keep your eye on this star because sometime in the next million years or so, Betelgeuse could explode in a tremendous supernova explosion.
Elsewhere in Orion's gang there's Auriga, the retired chariot driver with the bright star Capella. There's also Taurus the bull with the little arrow pointing to the right that outlines the face of the bull with the reddish star Aldebaran as the angry red eye of the beast. Just above Taurus are the Pleiades, a beautiful bright star cluster that resembles a tiny Big Dipper. The Pleiades is made up of more than 100 young stars, probably less than 100 million years old.
The very brightest "star" in Orion's gang is actually the planet Jupiter. In fact, it's the brightest star-like object in the entire evening sky. If you have that new Christmas telescope, give Jupiter a look-see. You should easily see at least some of its cloud bands across the 88,000 diameter mega planet. You should see up to four little "stars" either side of the great planet that are four of its largest moons. They're always changing positions while they orbit Jupiter in periods of two to 17 days. By the way, when you're using that new scope, make sure you let it and all the eyepieces sit outside for at least a half hour to let the optics adjust to the cold.
Comets
Comets, the dirty snow balls of our solar system are always showing up in showing up in our evening skies, but the vast majority of them are so faint, you really have to be a sharp telescope jockey to see them. If you do, all they really look like are little fuzz balls with wimpy little tails. This year though, two comets show some promise of being really bright. The first one is Comet Panstarrs that could be bright enough to see with the naked eye in the mid-March morning sky. In December, Comet ISON may be really bright with a long tail, but hold on. I want to emphasize though that comet brightness forecasting is extremely difficult and already there have been some claims on the internet that ISON could be the brightest comet of all time. It's way too early to make that claim and there's also a chance that one of both of them could fizzle. The bottom line? Stay tuned.
(Lynch is an amateur astronomer and author of the book, "Stars, a Month by Month Tour of the Constellations.")