Winter Stars Over the Mediterranean

In January 2020 I spent a night at a hilltop overlooking the Mediterranean Sea from elevation of 530 m, to photograph wide angle panoramas. This wide view of the southern horizon includes many bright winter stars and constellations shining over the Mediterranean.

The Winter Triangle asterism consists of three of these; Sirius, Procyon and Betelgeuse. Red giant star Betelgeuse normally shines around mag. +0.4~0.6. It is normally in par with Procyon, and sometimes gets as bright as Rigel, another prominent star in this view. But in 2019 it started to become unusually dim at mag. +1.5; the faintest it had been for the last three decades at least. Betelgeuse’s year-2020 episode of dimming was about to hit its minimum of mag +1.6~1.7 a couple weeks after this image.

Higher in the sky and to the right hand side of Betelgeuse shines Aldebaran in Taurus, which has a similar orange colour. Aldebaran is normally slightly fainter than Betelgeuse and is a good comparison for the usual minimums of Betelgeuse; but then Aldebaran clearly outshone it. In fact, even the two brightest stars of Gemini, Castor and Pollux were looking brighter than Betelgeuse. Conventional minimums of Betelgeuse are generally as bright as Pollux (mag. +1.2), while the minimum of 2020 was around Castor’s magnitude of +1.58. You can check out the annotated version to see the magnitudes of the bright winter stars.

There is one last star in view that is surely worth mentioning. Just above the southern horizon marked by the Mediterranean Sea and lights of a few boats; a relatively dim star with a deep reddish colour shines. This is my favourite star, Canopus, at its highest. (My e-mails have the word ‘canopia’ because of this.) Canopus is the second brightest star in the night sky, slightly fainter than Sirius 35 degrees to its north. From this location at 36d 48′ N, 530 meters of elevation and the atmospheric refraction, it can only rise 1 degree above the horizon. Its location is nicely underlined by the light of a boat, a chance alighnment. Thanks to all these conditions and the exceptionally good weather, Canopus is in good view.