Bob Moler's Ephemeris Blog

Ephemeris for St Valentine’s Day, Thursday, February 14th. Today the Sun will be up for 10 hours and 24 minutes, setting at 6:09, and it will rise tomorrow at 7:43. The Moon, 2 days past first quarter, will set at 4:18 tomorrow morning.

Nebulae, or clouds of gas and dust, sometimes have shapes when seen in telescopes that remind us of familiar objects, like the Horsehead nebula, the North American Nebula, the Saturn Nebula and so on. So on Valentine’s day I’ll direct you to nebula IC 1805, the Heart Nebula. In the center of the nebula is a nest of stars, many of which are massive with strong stellar winds that blew out the original birth cloud which collided into other clouds of gas to shape it into a rough heart from our vantage point. The color for Valentine’s day is red. Red is the nebula’s true color, it’s the primary color the element hydrogen gives off when excited. In this case excited by those hot young stars in its center.

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

Addendum

IC 1805 (Heart Nebula) Credit: s58y [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons