February 26
The Bear's Flank
Sun Position
The Sun is in Pisces near +12° declination. Northern hemisphere days near 11.5 to 12 hours; spring is approaching from both the calendar and the sky.
Sky Highlight
No annual event today. Ursa Major continues its winter climb into the northeastern sky, the Big Dipper is now tilted bowl-down in the northeast for northern mid-latitude observers around 9 pm, a classic late-winter orientation.
Deep Sky Object
M82, a starburst galaxy (Cigar Galaxy) about 12 million light-years away. The archetypal starburst galaxy, M82's central regions are forming stars roughly ten times faster than the Milky Way (driven by gravitational interaction with neighboring M81) with visible infrared emission and galactic superwind. Best from northern mid-latitudes and circumpolar at high northern latitudes.
Featured Star
Merak (β UMa) is a main-sequence A-type star 79.7 light-years away, spectral class A1V, and one of the five stars that share the Ursa Major Moving Group's common space motion. The bear's flank, paired with Dubhe to point at Polaris, two stars that have been giving navigators the same direction for millennia.
Around This Date
- February 26, 1966NASA launched AS-201, the first uncrewed test of the Apollo Command and Service Module, on a suborbital trajectory to test the heat shield at lunar re-entry velocities.
- February 28, 1802Heinrich Olbers discovered Pallas, the second asteroid found, less than a year after Ceres was identified, opening the era of systematic minor planet discovery.
Merak and Dubhe have pointed toward Polaris for as long as humans have navigated at night; they will stop, eventually, but not soon.