1 • THE LIGHT ON A FREEZING COLD MORNING.
We love those mornings when it is frosty cold, and you step outside into the crisp promise of a winter’s day. These days hold the still and fresh air that the long days of summer will never possess.
Visit www.harrorsmithmag.com/winter-weather to learn the seasonal weather forecast for your region of Canada by our weather expert Mark Sirois.
2 • THE WINTER NIGHT SKY
Slightly warmer temperatures in early winter this year make the time spent under the stars more comfortable. While global warming is bad, it has also presented some opportunities to stargaze at night in the middle of winter. — Astronomy expert, Robert Dick
3 • FULL MOONS IN THE DARKEST SKIES
Look for the full moons of winter on these dates and times they are at their peak:
The Little Spirit Moon
on December 7 at 11:08 p.m. EST.
The Spirit Moon
on January 6 at 6:08 p.m. EST.
The Bear Mon
on February 5 at 1:29 p.m. EST.
The Sugar Moon
on March 7 at 7:40 a.m. EST.
4 • THE GEMINID METEOR SHOWER ON DECEMBER 14-15
It will be shortly after the full moon, so the moon will be pretty bright, but the Geminid meteors tend to be bright too. So, if you can stay out past midnight, observers may see a nice display of roughly a meteor per minute. — Robert Dick
5 • THE ZODIACAL LIGHT IN EARLY JANUARY
If you also live in a rural area and get up about an hour before sunrise, during the first week of January or at the end of December (when the moonlight will not interfere), you may also see a faint hazy glow extending up from the eastern horizon forming an extension to this line through the planets. This is the Zodiacal light. This is sunlight scattering off interplanetary dust in the plane of our solar system. These bright planets and faint phenomena reveal the structure of our solar system and help us ponder our place in the cosmos. — Robert Dick
6 • SEEING SATURN, JUPITER AND MARS
In December, low in the southwest is the bright planet Saturn, further to the east and higher in the sky is the brilliant Jupiter, and over in the east is Mars. It's the bright "star" up and to the left (NE) of the bright star Aldebaran in the Hyades star cluster. A line drawn through these planets will show the ecliptic plane. All the planets orbit the Sun in a relatively flat plane called the ecliptic, that is the plane of our solar system. This is usually hard to envisage, but this winter, it becomes easier because we have three points of light to help us imagine this line across the sky. — Robert Dick
7 • PLANTS THAT HAVE AN ARCHITECTURE IN THE WINTER
We leave ornamental grasses and tall perennial seed heads standing through the winter. Ornamental grasses provide movement in the wind
