Show Notes
Dr Ian Musgrave brings us his February SkyGuide … telling us when, where and what to look for in the evening and morning skies this month, with some great astrophotography tips. Listen:
Summary: February is again a wonderful month for celestial observers with a great lineup of planets in your evening skies/
February Moon Phases:
Feb 2 Moon at perigee Feb 5 First quarter moon. Feb 13 Full Moon Feb 18 Moon at apogee Feb 21 Last quarter moon Feb 28 New moon
February’s Observing Highlights:
All the action in Morning Skies has now moved to the Evening Skies where we have a fabulous line-up of planetary action all month. Saturn, Venus, Jupiter and Mars are putting on a marvellous visual display for us and blue Uranus is also relatively easy to find.
Venus, even though it is in crescent phase, is at its brightest this month,
As usual Ian gives us ‘Ian’s Tangent’ … and this month it’s all about present and future ‘Planet Parades’
and in two weeks we're zooming over to Oxford University to speak with Dr Alex Cameron, an amazing astrophysicist who has used the JWST to discover a new and most unusual class of galaxies in the very early universe, just after the big bang
Keep looking Up!
More from Astronomy Astrophiz Podcast
What are gravitational waves, and could primordial black holes be dark matter? Astrophysicist Laura Byrne (University of Auckland) explains how the LISA space mission could detect them. Astrophiz podcast Episode 244.
Dr Ian 'Astroblog' Musgrave returns with your October 2026 Sky Guide for Australian skies, including Saturn at opposition (October 4), Mars crossing the Beehive Cluster (M44), the Orionid meteor shower, a daylight Lunar X on the 18th, and the occultation of Elnath (Beta Tauri) on October 29–30.
Is dark matter finally showing itself? In this episode of Astrophiz, Dr Sophia Gad-Nasr — particle cosmologist, science communicator, and creator of @AstropartiGirl — returns for her second appearance on the show (her first was Episode 90, back in 2019) to unpack the tantalising 2.6-sigma signal detected by the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) dark matter experiment, buried deep underground in South Dakota.
Dr Ian 'Astroblog' Musgrave returns with your essential guide to the September night sky — Venus at its greatest brilliancy (mag -4.5), the Moon's occultation of Antares, and Mercury lining up with Venus and Spica at dusk.
Trevor Barry — the Outback Astronomer — is a world-renowned planetary imager whose backyard observatory in Broken Hill, NSW, produces scientific-grade Jupiter and Saturn data used by NASA. In this episode of Astrophiz, host Brendan O'Brien travels to the outback to sit down with Trevor at his custom-built observatory.