For December, the Moon will be full on the 2nd; it’s the long night moon, up for 14 hours.

The winter solstice occurs at 11:47 a.m. on Dec. 21; this is the shortest day of the year.

The Geminid Meteor shower peaks on the morning of Dec. 14, so the waning crescent moon will interfere little with the approximately a meteor a minute fall of cometary debris from the NE.

Venus lies too close to the Sun to see now, and will emerge into the evening sky in early 2010. Mercury joins Jupiter in the evening at midmonth, reaching greatest eastern elongation, 20 degrees east of the setting Sun, on Dec. 18, then rapidly retrogrades between us and the Sun by month’s end.

But our attention should be devoted to that bright red object in the NE after sunset, Mars. Mars starts retrograding back westward in mid Dec., and will be magnitude -.8 with a disk about 13” of arc across by New Years, so that amateur telescopes will reveal its rapidly melting north polar cap and larger surface details.

The square of Pegasus dominates the western sky. The constellation Cassiopeia makes a striking W in the NW. She contains many nice star clusters for binocular users in her outer arm of our Milky Way, extending to the NE now. Her daughter, Andromeda, starts with the NE corner star of Pegasus’’ Square, and goes NE with two more bright stars in a row.

It is from the middle star, beta Andromeda, that we proceed about a quarter the way to the top star in the W of Cassiopeia, and look for a faint blur with the naked eye. M-31, the Andromeda Galaxy, is the most distant object visible with the naked eye, lying about 2.5 million light years distant.

To the northeast, Andromeda’s hero, Perseus, rises. Between him and Cassiopeia is the fine Double Cluster, faintly visible with the naked eye and two fine binocular objects in the same field. Perseus contains the famed eclipsing binary star Algol, where the Arabs imagined the eye of the gorgon Medusa would lie. Check it out on a clear Dec. evening, and see it the gorgon is winking at you.

Yellow Capella, a giant star the same temperature and color as our much smaller Sun, dominates the NE sky until even brighter Mars rises about two hours later. It is part of the pentagon on stars making up Auriga, the Charioteer (think Ben Hur). Several nice binocular Messier open clusters are found in the winter milky way here.

South of Gemini, Orion is the most familiar winter constellation, dominating the eastern sky by 8 p.m. The three stars in a row that mark his belt have a Christmas association in Latin America. As “Los Tres Reyes”, they stand for the three kings, bringing gifts to the Christ Child.

For more information on the Escambia Amateur Astronomers and our local star gazes for the public, visit our website at www.eaaa.net or call our sponsor, Dr. Wayne Wooten at PJC at (850) 484- 1152, or e-mail him at wwooten@pjc.edu.