Howdy Star Gazers and welcome to this episode
of Star Trails. My name is Drew and I'll be your
guide to the night sky for the week of February
the 1st through the 7th. This month we're turning
our attention to the most familiar objects in
the sky and asking why they still surprise us.
Stars are the first objects we learn to recognize.
They feel simple, steady, almost obvious, but
they aren't. Over the next few episodes, we're
going to stay with stars long enough for those
assumptions to fall apart, and see what's left
when we stop treating them as scenery. Later
in this episode, we'll cover the night sky for
this week, and we kick off the discussion of
the first three chapters of Night Watch, a book
that makes an excellent companion to this podcast.
Whether you're tuning in from the backyard or
the balcony, I'm glad you're here. So grab a
comfortable spot under the night sky and let's
get started. So I can almost hear the groans
out there. Why stars and why multiple episodes
dedicated to them? Some of you may even remember
episode 48, which was all about stars. And in
fact, it's one of the shows I recommend to new
listeners. Our discussion tonight will cover
some similar but different ground. We're going
to challenge what you think you know about these
building blocks of the universe, or at least
reframe them in a way that encourages taking
a fresh look at them. Today's show will cover
what a star is and what it isn't, and over the
next few weeks we'll dig deeper into the lives
of stars, their connections to humanity, and
their fantastic deaths. And finally, we'll break
out data, statistics, and the random number generator
to simulate the birth of half a million stars
in our own little version of the Big Bang. Stars
are anything but boring. We owe our existence
to them. After all, and I'm quoting Carl Sagan
here, we are made of star stuff. When we talk
about stars, we usually start with a definition.
A star is a ball of gas. A star is powered by
nuclear fusion. A star shines because hydrogen
is being turned into helium in its core. And
all of that is true, but it's also an oversimplification.
A star isn't an object in the way we normally
mean that word. It's more like a process. A temporary
state. A long negotiation between forces that
would very much prefer a different outcome. At
its heart, a star begins with failure. In a stellar
nursery, gravity pulls matter inward relentlessly.
Gas collapses, compresses, and heats. In most
cases, that collapse never gets far enough to
matter. Clouds fragment, disperse, or drift back
into obscurity without ever becoming anything
we'd recognize as a star. But sometimes, rarely,
that collapse doesn't happen. Pressure rises,
temperatures climb. Long before fusion ignites,
a proto -star is born. Hot, dense, glowing, not
because it's burning fuel, but because it's falling
inward. That phase can last millions of years,
with gravity doing nearly all the work. Only
when the core reaches extreme temperatures does
hydrogen fusion finally begin. At that moment,
gravity is interrupted. Outward pressure pushes
back. The collapse slows not because it's failed,
but because it's been delayed. Fusion doesn't
create a star so much as it delays the inevitable.
A star is what happens when gravity is stopped
temporarily. That balance is everything. If fusion
weakens, gravity wins. If gravity is resisted
too strongly, the star swells, sheds mass, or
destabilizes. There's no permanent state here,
only equilibrium held for a while. And that's
what a star is. And it's important to say what
a star is not. A star is not stable. We imagine
stars as eternal, fixed points in the sky, but
that stability is an illusion created by human
lifetimes. Even the longest -lived stars are
burning through finite fuel. Some burn recklessly
fast. Others sip slowly, but none escape the
clock. We often describe stellar life cycles
as neat stages, and you've probably seen diagrams
of this in books. Birth, main sequence, giant,
and eventually remnant. It's as if stars politely
queue up in advance and order. But nature doesn't
respect our diagrams. Massive stars rotate violently.
They lose material, they pulse, they interact
with companions. Some skip stages some reverse
course some collapse early many never follow
the standard path at all The life cycle we teach
is an average and most stars lives are messier
and more complicated Here's a wild fact most
stars are not alone Solitary stars like our Sun
are kind of unusual The majority of stars form
in pairs or groups, and their neighbors matter.
Companions exchange mass, distort orbits, and
alter fates. Some of the most dramatic, stellar
events we know about, certain supernova among
them, simply cannot happen unless a second star
is involved. A star's destiny is often shaped
not just by what it is, but by who it lives with.
Stars are social objects, yet we often regard
them as solitary. When a star does reach a relatively
stable phase, what we call the main sequence,
it sounds calm, ordinary, normal, but it isn't.
A star's life is that of contained violence,
internal turmoil, energy constantly trying to
shatter the grip of gravity. Inside a main sequence
star, hydrogen nuclei are constantly fusing into
helium under crushing pressure. Enormous amounts
of mass are converted directly into energy every
second. Gravity pushes inward. Fusion pushes
outward. What we experience as starlight begins
deep in the core, but it doesn't escape easily.
A photon created there doesn't travel straight
to the surface. It ricochets. It's absorbed and
re -emitted, bounced and scattered again and
again. That journey can take tens of thousands,
even millions of years. By the time that light
finally escapes into space, the conditions that
created it may no longer even exist. So a star's
glow is actually a slow leak. albeit the mechanism
that allows us to see them. Now let's talk about
color. We say stars are blue, white, yellow,
orange, or red as if color were a decoration.
But color is a diagnosis. A star's color tells
us its surface temperature. Blue stars burn hotter
and faster. Red stars burn cooler and often far
longer. or they are swollen giants nearing the
end of their balance. Human eyes are terrible
tools for measuring stellar color. In low light,
our color vision collapses. The atmosphere bends
and splits starlight. Near the horizon, stars
shimmer into rainbows. Sirius flashes blue, red,
and green, not because it's changing, but because
Earth won't hold still. Astrophotography has
trained us to expect color, but much of what
we see is interpretation layered atop reality,
calibration, enhancement, and long exposure,
revealing truths our eyes were never built to
perceive directly. The sky isn't lying, but it
isn't being entirely honest either. The same
is true for brightness. When we say a star is
bright, we're not describing the star itself.
We're describing a measurement. Astronomers use
a system called magnitude, a backward scale where
smaller numbers mean brighter objects and negative
numbers mark the brightest of all. It's an older
system refined mathematically but still rooted
in human perception. You'll often see stars categorized
by magnitude. Historically, ancient astronomers
catalogued stars down to about the sixth magnitude,
because that's where stars stop being reliably
visible to most people under natural skies. That's
why the original magnitude system ended there.
It was literally the edge of human perception.
In light -polluted skies, we might be able to
only see stars around magnitude 3. Binoculars
can draw in more light, often allowing us to
see stars at plus 9 or plus 10. Magnitude doesn't
tell us how powerful a star is, it tells us how
bright it appears from here on Earth. Brightness
is a collaboration between energy output and
distance, and we only experience the final result.
This is where our intuition really breaks down.
The stars that dominate our night sky, the ones
we learn first, the ones with names, are not
typical stars. They're either unusually luminous,
unusually close, or both. They're giants, supergiants,
or nearby standouts. These account for about
99 % of the stars we see from Earth. The vast
majority of stars in the Milky Way are nothing
like them. Most stars in our galaxy are small,
cool, dim, red dwarves. They burn slowly. They
live for trillions of years. And from Earth,
almost all of them are completely invisible.
They don't announce themselves, they don't dominate
constellations, and they don't shape mythology.
If you could somehow turn down the brightness
bias of the sky, if you could see all stars equally,
regardless of distance, The familiar patterns
we know would dissolve. The night would be flooded
with faint, unassuming points of light. Not every
collapsing object even becomes a star as we know
them. Sometimes a cloud gathers enough mass to
heat up and glow faintly, but never enough to
sustain hydrogen fusion. These objects are called
brown dwarves. They're too massive to be planets
and too small to be stars. Some briefly fuse
a heavy form of hydrogen called deuterium, buying
them a short -lived glow. Then gravity resumes
its work, and they cool and fade. Brown dwarfs
are not stars that died. They are stars that
never quite lived. You'll sometimes hear Jupiter
called a failed star. It isn't, because Jupiter
never tried to ignite. Planets form differently,
assembling piece by piece in a disk around a
young star. Jupiter would need to be more than
70 times more massive to even approach fusion.
Brown dwarves remind us that star formation is
not guaranteed. The universe produces many more
almosts than successes. Here's another strange
fact. We can't actually observe stars directly.
Every star in the night sky, except one, is an
unresolved point of light, with no surface detail,
no texture, just photons collected and interpreted.
Our sun is the only star we can truly study.
We observe it from Earth and from space. We send
probes into its atmosphere. We watch its surface
churn, flare, ripple, and erupt. Then we take
what we learn from the sun and extend it, carefully,
to every other star in the universe. Stars are
not understood individually. They are understood
statistically. The sun is our Rosetta Stone.
Stars don't exist just to shine. They exist to
transform matter. Inside stars, simple elements
are rearranged into more complex ones. And when
stars die, sometimes gently, sometimes violently,
they return that processed material to the galaxy.
Every atom heavier than hydrogen and helium owes
its existence to stars that lived and failed
long before the sun was born. Stars are not the
universe's final products. They're its workshops.
And that leads to the most important thing a
star is not. A star is not the main character
of the universe. We build our stories around
stars because we orbit one, because they light
our nights, because they're visually generous.
But stars are temporary fixtures in a universe
that prefers darkness, cold, and emptiness. They
are brief leaks of energy in a cosmos otherwise
content to coast. And that doesn't make them
insignificant. It makes them extraordinary. And,
we happen to live during one of those pauses,
on a planet warmed by a single star surrounded
by thousands more, most of which we'll never
see, all of which will eventually fail. After
a quick break we'll return with this week's Night
Sky report and I'll share my thoughts on the
first three chapters of Night Watch. Stay with
us. Welcome back. I don't know about you, but
the weather here in my area has been pretty rough
for the past week, owing to winter storms, low
temperatures, ice, and snow. I think I managed
to see the moon and some stars just one evening
in the past week. I know a lot of folks are being
impacted by winter weather right now, and many
of you are iced in like Superman in the Fortress
of Solitude. So hopefully wherever you are, you're
at least staying warm. As we look at the sky
tonight through the seventh, one of the first
things you'll notice is the full moon, the snow
moon, shining high and bright early in the week.
The full phase occurs tonight. In much of the
Northern Hemisphere, February is among the snowiest
months of the year, so cultures from Native American
tribes to colonial settlers use this snow moon
as kind of a natural calendar marker. It's also
been called the hungry moon, the Bear Moon, the
Ice Moon, and other names rooted in the seasons
and the challenges winter brings. This full moon
means faint deep sky objects will be washed out
early in the week. That said, bright targets
like open clusters and contrasty stellar fields
still hold up beautifully, and the moon's presence
itself becomes part of the story. An interesting
moment coming right at the start of the observation
window is the moon's close association with the
bright star Regulus in Leo. Tonight and into
the second, the moon sits near Regulus, so close
that from some parts of North America, it will
even occult Regulus on the second. Be sure to
check in with an app like Stellarium to determine
the exact time of the occultation. For instance,
at my location, the right limb of the moon will
just barely graze Regulus around 9pm on that
date. As the week progresses, the moon wanes
to gibbous, which means later nights after moonset
give cleaner views of star clusters and the subtler
features in the winter sky. Planets this week
are not the main attraction, but there are a
couple worth noting. Jupiter is still visible
in the early evening, shining brightly before
it sinks toward the west. It's past its best
opposition views, but it's still unmistakable
and makes a good anchor point in the sky. Saturn
is much fainter and lower and really requires
binoculars or a telescope to appreciate, but
it's there for patient observers. Now let's talk
about stars and clusters, especially the ones
people tend to overlook. High in the sky this
week, you'll find the faint constellation Cancer.
Cancer doesn't have any bright stars to announce
itself, but it hides two excellent clusters that
reward a slower look. The first is the Beehive
cluster, also known as Messier 44. To the naked
eye under darker skies, it appears as a soft
patch of light. In binoculars, it explodes into
dozens of stars scattered across a wide field.
This is one of those objects that feels more
natural in binoculars than in a telescope, and
it's especially satisfying once the moon has
dipped lower in the sky. Nearby is Messier 67,
a very different kind of cluster. M67 is older,
tighter, and more subdued. It doesn't jump out
at you, but once you settle in, it feels dense
and deliberate. almost like a fossil record of
an earlier generation of stars. It's an excellent
contrast to the beehive, and a reminder that
not all clusters tell the same story. If you're
willing to move your gaze a little farther south,
look toward Monoceros, the unicorn. This is one
of the most underappreciated winter constellations,
largely because it's faint and doesn't resemble
much of anything at a first glance. But Monoceros
is rich in star clusters. One standout here is
NGC 2244, the central cluster of the Rosette
region. Even if the surrounding nebula is washed
out by moonlight, the cluster itself is visible
in binoculars or a small scope as a loose grouping
of young stars. This is a great object to revisit
later in the month under darker skies, but it's
still worth finding now. Back in Orion, but away
from the famous nebula, there's a small charming
cluster called NGC 2169. Through binoculars or
a low -power telescope, its stars form a pattern
that looks like the number 37. It's subtle and
a little whimsical. This is also a good week
to simply wander star fields, spend some time
around Procyon and Canis Minor, or scan the regions
between Orion and Gemini. These areas don't have
marquee objects, but they're full of subtle patterns,
faint companions, and gentle color contrasts
that are easy to miss when you're always chasing
famous targets. Because the moon is bright early
in the week, think about timing rather than fighting
conditions. Step outside before moonrise or stay
out after it sets. Use binoculars, let your eyes
adapt, and don't rush. It's finally time to discuss
our first book club selection, Night Watch, by
Terence Dickinson. I chose this book because
it's often recommended as a good starting point
for beginner stargazers. That doesn't mean seasoned
observers can't enjoy it. Every time I open it,
I learn something new, and I've mentioned it
before, but this book could be an accompanying
text for this podcast because it's really aimed
at backyard binocular observers. Before we go
any further, it's worth talking briefly about
editions, because Nightwatch has been updated
several times over the years, and you may not
all be reading the same one. I'm personally working
from the 4th edition, which technically only
carries star charts through 2025. That's still
completely fine for what we're doing here. The
fundamentals haven't changed, the sky hasn't
rearranged itself, and everything in these early
chapters remains solid and relevant. There is
a new fifth edition, and if you're using that
one, you'll notice a few meaningful upgrades.
The photography throughout the book is more modern,
with newer astrophotography replacing some of
the older images, many of which, in earlier editions,
were taken by Dickinson himself, and definitely
show their age. The fifth edition also expands
coverage of the southern sky, which is valuable
in general, even if we don't spend much time
there on this podcast. There's also more material
related to modern observing and imaging techniques,
including astrophotography. That said, for our
purposes, especially these opening chapters focused
on orientation, scale, and backyard observing,
the fourth and fifth editions are philosophically
identical. The words still land the same, the
guidance still works, and the sky they describe
is the same one above your head tonight. So if
you've got the fifth edition, great. If you're
working from the fourth, don't worry, you're
not behind and you're not missing anything essential
for this discussion. This opening chapter, Discovering
the Cosmos, is brief, but it's doing something
important. Dickinson makes it very clear that
astronomy doesn't begin with equations or equipment.
It begins with attention. He frames astronomy
as something you can do with your eyes alone,
then gradually expands that to binoculars and
telescopes without ever making the naked eye
feel like a lesser option. One line of thinking
that really resonated with me is his idea that
we're all celestial tourists, and just like traveling
somewhere new on Earth, the experience gets richer
when you understand a little about where you
are and what you're looking at. You don't need
to be an expert, but knowing the lay of the land
changes everything. That philosophy should feel
very familiar to listeners of this podcast. The
goal isn't to pile on jargon or technical baggage.
It's to untangle it just enough so the sky starts
feeling accessible. If Chapter 1 is an invitation,
Chapter 2 is perspective therapy. This chapter,
The Universe in Eleven Steps, walks outward from
Earth in steps, each one expanding the scale
by factors of a hundred, until you're suddenly
dealing with distances and sizes that stop making
intuitive sense. And that's the point. Dickinson
is taking an honest look at the problem of scale
in our universe and how to begin to comprehend
its vastness. What really stands out here is
how visual this chapter is. Even if you're familiar
with the structure of the solar system, the Milky
Way, and beyond, seeing it laid out this way
reminds you just how strange our situation is.
We're not at the center of anything. We're not
special in location. We're riding along in a
galaxy that's one among billions. By the time
this chapter ends, you have a much better sense
of where the night sky fits into the larger universe.
Now, this is where Night Watch really starts
to feel like a companion to this podcast. Chapter
3, Backyard Astronomy, is densely packed, but
it's written with a light touch. It covers how
the sky moves, while stars appear to rotate around
Polaris. and how Earth's rotation creates that
slow celestial swirl we talked about earlier
this year on the show. One of my favorite sections
is Dickinson's discussion of measuring the sky
using your hands, how a fist held at arm's length
spans about 10 degrees, and how your fingers
can become a built -in ruler. This is such a
simple idea, but it's incredibly empowering once
you start using it. Suddenly, the sky feels measurable,
navigable, and less abstract. He also does a
nice job showing how familiar constellations
act as signposts. Using the Big Dipper to find
stars like Arcturus, Vega, Deneb, and Regulus
turns the sky into a map instead of a guessing
game. There's also a subtle but important discussion
of star brightness that ties directly into something
we talked about earlier in this episode. Most
of the stars we can see from Earth are not typical
stars. They're larger and more luminous than
our Sun, and yet the Sun itself is brighter and
larger than more than 90 % of the stars in the
Milky Way. This chapter also introduces constellations,
explains why they're named the way they are,
and even includes a pronunciation guide, and
I'll admit, that was humbling. There are a few
names in here that I've been confidently mispronouncing
for years. Finally, Dickinson touches on the
stuff that moves, such as satellites, rocket
bodies, and space stations, and reminds us that
not everything crossing the sky is ancient or
distant. Some of it is very much ours. What I
appreciate most about these opening chapters
is they don't assume you're starting from zero,
but they're easy to understand even if you are.
I also want to take a moment to say something
in defense of books themselves. Like many of
you, I tend to read books on a device these days,
like a Kindle. Nightwatch is not available as
a download, and that's not a bad thing. Astronomy
is a field that moves quickly in some ways and
incredibly slow in others, and books like Night
Watch sit right at that intersection. The technology
changes, the photography improves, the charts
get updated, but the sky doesn't reinvent itself
every year. There's something uniquely valuable
about a well -designed astronomy book. It invites
you to slow down, flip a few pages, and let ideas
settle. That's why Nightwatch feels like such
a natural fit for this show. It's trying to teach
you how to look, how to think, and how to stay
curious. It's exactly the right tool for the
kind of astronomy we're practicing here. We'll
discuss the next two chapters two weeks from
now. Chapter four is all about stars, which aligns
nicely with this month's theme. Chapter five
is a discussion about stargazing equipment. and
includes an honest and eye -opening discussion
about the nature of telescopes. I think you'll
enjoy both sections. Also, the Nightwatch website,
nightwatchbook .com, contains additional content
such as videos and links to online resources
that complement the book. Check that out if you
get a chance. And I don't have any homework to
give out or anything, but if you want to share
your thoughts on the book, Feel free to send
me a note via the show website. That's going
to do it for this week. If you found this episode
interesting, please share it with a friend who
might enjoy it. The easiest way to do that is
by sending folks to our website, StarTrails .Show.
And if you want to support the show, use the
link on the site to buy me a coffee. That really
helps. Be sure to follow Star Trails on Blue
Sky and YouTube. Links are in the show notes.
Until we meet again beneath the stars, clear
skies everyone.