Caoimhín's Content

Today we are going to be looking ahead to the month of February, starting of course with the 1st of February this weekend. So, a Happy Imbolc or Imbolg, Lá Féile Bríd, or St Brigid’s Day, whatever you would like to call the first day of February, it is a festival of some sort in many places.

Very quickly we’ll take a look at sunset here on the very first of February. We’ve got Venus, the Moon, Saturn, Jupiter and Mars all in the sky together. The Moon is close to new on the 1st, but it won’t take too long for us to come up to the Full Moon, the Full Moon is going to be reasonably early in February. The Moon is rising at 99.9% full on the 12th of February. We will still have Saturn, Venus, Jupiter, Mars and the Moon in the sky together, forming a nice arc approximating the ecliptic across the sky. If we zoom out and look at the whole sky, so that they’re all as close to being on a straight line as they’re going to get, you can see that they are not quite in line. You could absolutely draw a line of best fit that passes close to all of the planets, but no one straight line passes through them all. We’ll push a little bit later and we can still see everything, the Full Moon and all of those planets visible as early as just 7 o’clock, on the very first day of February.

I mentioned Imbolc, which is the name of one of the cross quarter days. This means that the 1st of February is pretty much halfway between the winter solstice and the vernal equinox for us in the northern hemisphere. We’re right in between the solstice and the equinox on any cross-quarter day. The day length has been getting longer, but it hasn’t reached an equal point yet, our nights are still a little bit longer than our days, but that is progressively changing and we’re halfway to the point where day and night will be of equal length.

Moving back to the night of the Full Moon, the brightness of the Full Moon makes quite a big difference. Observing the night sky closer to the New Moon and and then again closer to the Full Moon, should let you see or measure the difference in brightness. This particular Full Moon, it doesn’t look like we get to see it at 100% from Ireland. We saw it rising at 99.9% at sunset on the 12th, so let’s go all the way through to the morning, technically the morning after the Full Moon, and it drops to only 99.5%. If we go back a day, it’s higher at 99.8%, but still not 100%. As such, it looks like we’re not going to see the Moon at exactly 100% full, but that happens every now and again.

Of course, February is a month of only 28 days and the lunar cycle is 29 and a half, so there is no guarantee that you will actually get a Full Moon in the month of February at all. This year we do and coming back up to our 99.9% full and pushing backwards in time, the Moon reaches 100% full just before it rises for us. We’re not going to get to see that 100%, but we will see the Moon next to a very bright star. It’s Regulus, so we are looking into Leo the Lion for this particular Full Moon. Observing it just after the Sun goes down, or even a little later, coming up to 9 o’clock is still pretty early in the night, it may retain a little bit of that kind of orangey sunset glow. However as it rises higher in the sky, we’ll get to see that kind of sharper white, whiteish gray that we’re used to when we’re looking at the Moon.

Full Moons, are often given various names based on the time of year in which they occur, but as you may be able to guess, it’s not just what month in which they occur. February, being only 28-ish days, may not have a Full Moon in it at all. Every other month, being 30 or 31 days, could start with a Full Moon and end with a Full Moon, so you can get multiple Full Moons in one month. There are names given to the Full Moons related to the time of year, and if you’d like to find your local ones, the best thing to do is look up a local almanac. You may have to look pretty far in the past to find an appropriate almanac, such as a farmer’s almanac. Almanacs generally could cover a variety of topics, but a farmer’s almanac would usually cover things like the seasons, the Moon, its phases, and sometimes the tides as well. You may wonder why a farmer would need to know the tides, but there are a variety of reasons. Seaweed was used for fertilizer for example, particularly here in Ireland, but also in other locations around the world, and it is easier to harvest at low tide. Many almanacs, such as the Poor Richard’s and Old Farmer’s, were quite general, though some political almanacs exist, so finding the right one is important.

Looking at this months Full Moon, from one day to the next we can see its illumination jumping from exactly 99.7% to exactly 99.7%, just either side of the absolute fullest. We can see a small amount of shadow on the western limb pointing towards sunset on the 13th, after moving through to 3 o’clock in the morning after the Full Moon rose with sunset on the 12th. Going back to the 12th at 3 o’clock in the morning, we can see that same amount of shadow, but over on the eastern limb, so we can really see how we’re missing 100% full, but also quite close to it.

The popular names currently given to the Full Moons are said to derive from Native American stories and mythology. I do think it’s important to clarify, as I occasionally do, that the Native American peoples are huge number of different cultures. Of course there’s North America and South America, which already makes a big difference, but there are various different ethnic groups even within the Native American tribes of North America. The First Nations people who live in Canada may be Inuit or they may be Algonquin, they may be Athabascan, or Iroquoian or part of some other group. I don’t exactly know of course, because I don’t live there. If you see people saying for example that this particular Full Moon is called the Snow Moon by the Native Americans, it’s important to remember that some Native Americans live in deserts. For example, the Puebloan people of the Great Basin region they wouldn’t have seen that much snow, given that they live in a desert. They wouldn’t have seen much rain, let alone snow, so of course calling it the Snow Moon may not be accurate for them. It’s the same with the Wolf Moon. You may know that North America has coyotes, they do also have wolves, though the current extent of the gray wolf is mostly restricted to the north of the continent. You mostly see gray wolves, in the modern day, north of the Canadian border in Canada, there are some gray wolf territories in the United States of America, but it’s quite far in the north of North America, it would be coyotes that you would normally see further south. Coyotes have a very big range, you can also see them pretty far north.

Regardless of what you call it, it’s a fantastic Full Moon and we’ve got that coming up right at the start of February, with our New Moon coming right at the end, on the 28th of February. I say that, but of course it never hurts to check, we’ll double check when we’re getting the New Moon according to Stellarium. According to this software, the Moon is at about 0% illuminated on the 28th, at 5 o’clock in the morning, yeah. Pretty much the exact newest point of this lunar cycle is just before sunrise for us in Ireland. In the same way that not every location on Earth gets to see the 100% fullest Moon, not every location on Earth gets to see the 0% newest Moon either. Of course, nobody actually gets to see the New Moon because the New Moon is in front of the Sun.

We’ve made it all the way to the end of February, and I won’t be talking about Saturn and Mercury much today. I will talk about them when we get a little bit later in February, but I will soon be discussing other future events that are much further in the future in the next article. The sky should be nice and dark coming up to 8:30 by the end of the month. From here, we’re going to move back through February just in case I missed anything and I didn’t, there does not seem to be any radiants of any particular meteor showers popping up during the month of February, certainly nothing major. At the beginning of February the December Leonis Minorids are technically still running, but the name is a clue, the December Leonis Minorids peak way back in December. They run for a very long time there, we can see it running basically two months from the start December until the start of February, all of December and all of January. However, it still really only peaks on one day, the 20th of December, so we won’t seeing a significant number of meteors from the December Leonids once we’re into even into January, certainly not once we’re into February, and we that radiant disappears as we come a little bit later in February.

The Antihelion radiant is there all of the time, and you can look back on one of my previous pieces to learn more. Even though there are no meteor showers ongoing, there is always a chance that some meteors will fall through the sky, it’s simply that you have a better chance on the night where there are meteor showers. With a meteor shower at its peak, you’re likely going to see more meteors, those meteors will often be bigger and brighter, but not all meteor showers are incredibly productive in terms of quantity. Of course sometimes you want quality, and if you see just one bolide, just one fireball, in a night where you otherwise see no shooting stars at all, that one bolide can still be incredibly impressive. There are videos of the bolide that detonated, and they do detonate, these fireballs can explode, there is footage of a detonating fireball above Chelyabinsk in Russia. That meteor was able to take out windows, it was a meteor that exploded above the ground, it air burst reasonably far above the ground and the sheer shockwave took out the windows of shops and homes. Luckily, I don’t believe too many people were injured, not too many serious injuries at least, but they can also be a major distraction. A big fiery ball of rock exploding in the sky, that’s going to make you take your eyes off the road, if nothing else does.

Looking at the end of the month out in the countryside, of course, we will have Mercury. You do need to be out in the countryside if you want to see Mercury and Saturn as low in the sky as they will be, and really clear horizon necessary, I will talk about it a little bit more in the near future.

At the end of the month with that New Moon, of course, we’re going to have a fantastic view of the nighttime sky. Even coming back to that night of the Full Moon, the light of the Moon is going to block out the glow of the Milky Way, but we can still see far, far more stars. If we come right back to the beginning of the month, on Imbolc, you won’t even have to wait too long for the Moon to go down, we’re getting our Full Moon close enough to the middle of February that the beginning is pretty close to new. Heading to the 2nd, just in case you don’t manage to make it out on the actual 1st of February, if you manage to make it out into the countryside, there’s that lovely arc of the Milky Way, as early as 11:30 with the Moon is already down.

I hope you get a chance to see some of these things. I hope you get a chance to see the Full Moon that’s coming up on the 12th of February especially, and I hope you get to see the sky nice and dark on the very first of February, it’s a festival for so many people so I hope you get a chance to see it. I also hope that you enjoyed this piece, if you did, please make sure to like it. You can also subscribe to this website and my YouTube channel. You can also comment this article if there’s anything you’d like me to talk about in the future or if you have any questions. I do try to put something out every Tuesday and every Thursday, so it should be nice and regular. Hopefully I’ll see you back here for the next regular installment.