Skywatching Highlights for January 2024

The year kicks off with the Quadrantid meteor shower, which peaks after midnight tonight, Jan. 4. Light from the third-quarter moon will brighten the sky on the peak night, causing fainter meteors to be lost from view. But the shower does produce a decent number of bright meteors, called fireballs, so it can still be worth the watch. If viewing from a dark sky location, people may see 20-25 meteors per hour at the peak. They can catch a few meteors in the days before or after as well.

In fact, the shower is active through around Jan. 12, so a fireball might be seen in the week after the peak when the Moon has moved out of the predawn sky.

On Jan. 8, in the hour before sunrise, look for brilliant Venus rising with a slim crescent Moon in the Southeast. Bright star Arcturus hangs high above them. The Moon will appear quite close to the red giant star Antares, the fiery red heart of Scorpius, that morning. And for observers in parts of the Western U.S., the Moon will actually occult, or pass in front of, Antares as the pair is rising that morning. For those who have a view of the horizon, this is also a good morning to spot Mercury before the sky brightens. It’s quite low, but rises above 10 degrees off the horizon as dawn warms the sky and it will be shining even brighter than Arcturus.

Next up, the crescent moon visits Saturn on Jan. 13 and Jan. 14. The pair will be found in the southwest for a couple of hours following sunset both nights. Then the Moon pairs up with Jupiter in the evening on Jan. 17 and Jan. 18. This is actually a great week to pull out the telescope or binoculars because as soon as it’s fully dark people can work their way across the sky, starting with Jupiter and its moons, Earth’s own Moon, the Pleiades, Aldebaran and the Hyades star cluster, and the Orion Nebula.

One of the things that makes skywatching so interesting is that the sky is always changing. The stars rise in the east and set in the west each night. The Moon gradually waxes and wanes as it goes through its monthly cycle. And likely it’s been noticed that the stars seen on a given night change slowly over the course of the year. The bright stars and constellations seen on warm summer nights are not the ones that fill the chilly sky in winter.

This is because the stars rise four minutes earlier each day – and these minutes add up over time. In just one week, a given star will rise 28 minutes earlier than it does tonight. And in one month, the same star will be rising about two hours earlier. So at four minutes per day, or two hours per month, after six months, the stars of summer are rising a full 12 hours earlier than they did back in June, placing them high in the daytime sky. But in their place, the evening sky belongs to the stars of winter.

This slow-motion cycle in the sky plays out annually as Earth moves in its orbit around the Sun. The view outward into space during the night depends on where Earth is in its orbit. At one part of the year, the view of space from Earth’s night side looks in one direction, and six months later the view is in the opposite direction. And so the nighttime view of the cosmos changes over the course of the year because the stars aren’t moving – Earth is! And that change happens at a pace of four minutes per day.

Here are the phases of the Moon for January. Stay up-to-date on NASA’s missions exploring the solar system and beyond at science.nasa.gov.

Preston Dyches, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, “What’s Up” for January