As Christmas approaches, and crowds swarm through the supermarkets, the winter night sky offers up many tasty treats of its own. Orion now clears the eastern horizon by mid-evening, and bright Jupiter can be seen from 9pm, blazing away to the left of the Hunter like a bright blue-white star.

Almost level with Jupiter, but closer to Orion (its belt actually points straight to it), the brightest star in the whole sky, Sirius, blazes like a finely cut diamond on crisp winter nights. Because it is always low in the sky as seen from the UK we always look at it through lots of moving air, which is why it appears to twinkle and flash so violently.

If you have binoculars use them to look at the sky just beneath Sirius, You'll see a pretty cluster of blue-white stars. This is M41, and it's over 2,000 light years away.

Stuart Atkinson

Eddington Astronomical Society of Kendal