With New Year’s Eve upon us, one of the things I like to do and I’m sure you do too is to think back on all past events of 2017.

Astronomically for me, without a doubt, it was the solar eclipse on Aug. 21.

My wife and I, along with some really good friends, journeyed to eastern Nebraska and wound up watching the total eclipse in the clear skies over the Moffett farmstead in Ravenna.

I’ve been living that magical day over and over again. I have so many great memories from that day but the ultimate for me was the meager but heavenly light emanating from the sun just before and after totality. Words can’t do it justice.

Good Lord willing I’ll be at the next total eclipse in the United States on April 8, 2024.

New Year’s Eve

Sunday is party time for a lot of folks. Some of you may even get a little lit up tonight, but the heavens will really get lit up.

If you step outside from a party or any other shenanigans you may be up to, provided the skies are clear enough, you’ll see that the night is lit up with a near full moon along with at least some of the brighter stars and constellations.

By the way, if the moon seems extra big and bright tonight and tomorrow night, it is.

You’ll hear it referred to as a “super moon” since it’s physically so close to the Earth.

Since the moon’s 27.3-day orbit around the Earth is an ellipse rather than an exact circle, its distance is not constant. It varies from date to date during its circuit.

The moon’s maximum distance from Earth, called apogee, is about 252,700 miles and its minimum distance, dubbed perigee, is about 221,500 miles.

Meanwhile, the moon’s phase cycle from new moon to new moon is 29.5 days, a little longer than its actual orbital period around the Earth.

It just so happens that the first full moon of 2018 tomorrow is only 221,773 miles away from Earth, less than 300 miles from perigee making the closest full moon of 2018.

It’ll be a about 7 percent larger and 15 percent brighter than an average full moon.

Brightest star

Most of the bright stars around midnight will be especially congregated in the southern half of the Butler celestial dome where Orion the Hunter and his gang of other bright constellations will be holding court.

Without a doubt they’re my favorite set of constellations. Orion’s most striking feature is his belt, made up of three bright stars in a near perfect row.

If you extend Orion’s belt with your mind’s eye to the lower left, you’ll run right into a seriously bright star. That’s Sirius, the brightest star in the entire night sky and the brightest star in the constellation Canis Major, Orion’s loyal hunting dog.

You won’t find any brighter star than Sirius in any part of the night sky or at any other time of the year.

The reason it’s such a bright shiner is that it is one of the closer stars to us, at least relatively speaking. Sirius is about 8½ light years away, which works out to roughly 50 trillion miles.

Believe it or not, that’s considered down the block astronomically. Most stars you see with the naked eye, are much farther away, some hundreds, some even thousands of light years away.

Also, since Sirius is more than 8 light years away, you’re not seeing it as it is right now, but you’re seeing what it looked like in 2010 when “The Walking Dead” first showed up on TV and the first Apple iPads started showing up on the market.

It has taken that long for the light from Sirius, a star more than twice as large as our sun, to reach our eyes on planet Earth.

Sirius is also the patron star of New Year’s because the brightest nighttime star rises to its highest point in the sky at the stroke of midnight as you’re saying hello to 2018.

Nearly all of the stars in the sky arc across the sky, rising in the east and setting in the west. They reach their highest point in the sky above the southern horizon, crossing an imaginary line called the meridian. The meridian bisects the sky, running from the northern point of the horizon to the overhead zenith and then on to the southern point of the horizon.

At midnight Sirius will be transiting the meridian and at its highest point, about 30 degrees above the southern horizon, or about a third of the way from the southern horizon to the directly overhead zenith.

If it’s too cloudy on New Year’s Eve, or if you don’t want to break away from your New Year’s bash, no worries. The entire first week of 2018 will have the brightest star in the night hanging at its highest in the midnight hour.

Celestial hugging

If, by chance, you stay up all night to bring in 2018 you can check out the Jupiter-Mars going on in the low southeastern sky between about 5 to 7 a.m.

The two planets are in a tight conjunction, what I like to call a celestial hugging, less than 2 degrees apart with Jupiter the brighter of the two to the lower left of Mars.

In fact, Jupiter is by far the brightest starlike object in the early morning sky. Even without binoculars or a telescope, Mars has a definite reddish hue to it.

Mars and Jupiter will appear even closer to each other as this week progresses. Next Sunday morning, Jan. 7, they’ll seem to be almost touching, only 0.2 degrees apart, which is less than the width of your finger held at arm’s length toward the sky.

Jupiter and Mars are physically nowhere near each other. They’re just in the same line of sight.

Jupiter is actually more than 550 million miles away and Mars is more than 180 million miles from Earth.

Conjunctions of planets actually happen quite often as our Earth and the rest of the major planets in our solar system orbit the sun in nearly the same mathematical plane.

Happy stargazing New Year.

Make the stars your old friends

If you have any astronomical questions or want me to write about something you’re seeing in the night sky drop me a line at mikewlynch@comcast.net

Mike Lynch is an amateur astronomer and professional broadcast meteorologist for WCCO Radio in Minneapolis/St. Paul and is author of the book, “Stars: a Month by Month Tour of the Constellations” published by Adventure Publications and available at bookstores or at http://www.adventurepublications.net.