Bob Moler's Ephemeris Blog

Ephemeris for Thursday, February 27th.  The sun will rise at 7:23.  It’ll be up for 11 hours and 4 minutes, setting at 6:27.   The moon, 2 days before new, will rise at 6:36 tomorrow morning.

Orion, the central winter constellation is seen in the south at 9 p.m. He is a hunter, but he’s preoccupied with the charge of Taurus the bull from the upper right.  At Orion’s feet, and unnoticed by him is the small constellation of Lepus the hare.  It’s very hard to see a rabbit in its eight dim stars: however, I do see a rabbit’s head ears and shoulders.  A misshapen box is the head and face of this critter facing to the left.  His ears extend upwards from the upper right star of the box, and the bend forward a bit.  Two stars to the right of the box and a bit farther apart hint at the front part of the body.  In Lepus telescopes can find M79, a distant globular star cluster, one of the few of these compact star clusters visible in the winter sky.

Times are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan.  They may be different for your location.

Addendum

Lepus the hare as imagined in Stellarium. I haven’t added the four stars in the ears as I saw it based on the older Sky and Telescope magazine star charts.

Globular star cluster M79 is very distant: 41,000 light years from us and 60,000 light years from the center of the Milky Way.  It possibly was a member of the Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy that seems to have become entangled with our own Milky Way galaxy.  That’s what massive galaxies do to smaller, less massive dwarf galaxies:  “Resistance is futile, you will be assimilated”.