The January night sky

Graphic: Finbarr Sheehy

The SE quadrant at our map times belongs to Orion and the star-rich winter constellations. As if this wasn’t enough, the sky welcomes the New Year with its own fireworks display in the guise of the Quadrantids meteor shower.

Active from 1-6 January, this is predicted to peak for just a few hours around 08:00 GMT on the 4th, or even a few hours earlier by some suggestions. Its meteors diverge from a radiant point in northern Bootes, below and to the left of the handle of the Plough as it climbs from low in the N at nightfall, through the NE to stand high in the E before dawn.

The light of the waning Moon is not too obtrusive, and, with rates of up to 100 or more meteors per hour under ideal conditions, this may yield our best meteor show of 2016.

Mercury may be glimpsed very low in the SW at nightfall over the first few days of the year, but no other bright planets are visible until Jupiter rises in the E some 90 minutes after our map times. Slow-moving in SE Leo and brightening from mag -2.2 to -2.4, it is conspicuous and due S at 05:00 on the 1st when it sits above-right of the Moon and shows a 39 arcsec disc through a telescope. This swells to 42 arcsec during the month to make an ideal target for all those telescopes bought for Christmas. Catch it close to the Moon again on the 27th-28th.

Mars rises in the ESE at about 02:00 on the 1st and less than 30 minutes earlier by 31st. Brightening from mag 1.3 to 0.8, it sweeps from E of the mag 1.0 star Spica in Virgo and onwards to Libra. Mars’s steady orange hue contrasts with the bluish twinkling of Spica, while both lie to the right of the waning Moon in the S before dawn on the 4th.

Venus, a brilliant mag -4.1, rises almost 3 hours before the Sun on the 1st and 90 minutes before sunrise on the 31st. Moving E from Scorpius to Sagittarius, it passes only 5 arcmin N of Saturn (mag 0.5) early on the 9th. Both lie near the weaning earthlit Moon on the 6th.

Comet Catalina (officially C/2013 US10) is a 6th mag two-tailed smudge that stands only 0.5° SW of Arcturus in Bootes before dawn on the 1st. It speeds N to pass 1.2° E of Alkaid, at the end of the Plough’s handle, on the 15th.