MINNESOTA STARWATCH FOR FEBRUARY 2026

     February opens with the rising of a full moon close to sunset on the 1st. This won’t be a supermoon, but it will be on the large side and almost perfectly round as it clears the eastern horizon.

     As the moon wanes, it leaves more of the evening hours to the array of bright winter constellations and Jupiter, which outshines every star. All these objects will be up in the southeast to south at nightfall, including Sirius—the brightest of stars and the latest-rising member of the assembly.

     Highest in the group is brilliant Capella, the beacon in the pentagon of stars that form the constellation Auriga, the charioteer. Through powerful telescopes, Capella resolves into four stars—two classified as yellow giant stars and two as red dwarfs. Next to Capella is a narrow isosceles triangle of stars. The two smaller ones, called the Kids, represent young goats held by the charioteer.

     From anywhere above latitude 44 degrees north, Capella is high enough in the sky to be a circumpolar star, like Polaris and the stars of the Big and Little Dippers. That is, it never sets, but continually circles the point in the sky directly over the North Pole. Seen from Minnesota, it’s sort of a borderline case, as the lower part of its path “scrapes the horizon.”  

     West of Auriga, look for the Pleiades star cluster, which marks the shoulder of Taurus, the bull. Below the Pleiades is the V-shaped Hyades cluster, which outlines the face of Taurus. The bull’s eye is Aldebaran, a giant star unrelated to the Hyades. Aldebaran’s name comes from the Arabic for “the follower,” because it appears to follow the Pleiades across the night sky.

     This year February is what’s sometimes called a perfect month: one that starts on a Sunday and ends on a Saturday. Of course, February is the only month that can perform this feat.