On these chilly February nights, there’s nothing quite as nice as a good belt, something to keep you all warm and toasty. Of course, I’m talking hot chocolate, tea, or maybe if it’s appropriate, an intoxicating belt! The winter constellations are plenty intoxicating naturally and they hang over — in a good way — your head every cloud- free Butler night.

In the winter skies we have a bright stellar belt among the stars and you can consume it with your eyes.

I’m talking about Orion’s belt, in the constellation Orion the Hunter. Even if you’re not all that into stargazing, and you just ran into this column for the first time, I know you’ve seen it before.

As soon as it’s dark enough, look for a bright star formation that looks at first glance like either an hourglass or a sideways bow tie almost directly above the southern horizon. Unlike a lot of constellations it doesn’t take too much imagination when you look at that shape to see the outline of a broad shouldered man.

All of Orion’s stars are bright, but the very brightest are Rigel, which marks the hunter’s left knee; and Betelgeuse, a bright star that appears orange-red to even the naked eye, that marks Orion’s right armpit. In fact, Betelgeuse is an Arabic name that roughly translates to “armpit of the great one.”

Astronomically, the star Betelgeuse is simply the biggest thing you’ve ever seen, except for our national debt. It’s a dying, pulsating star that occasionally bloats out to a diameter of nearly a billion miles.

Our own sun is no match in size, at less than a million miles in diameter. Keep an eye on Betelgeuse, because sometime between tonight and the next million years Betelgeuse will blow itself to smithereens. Don’t miss it, although it will be hard not to. Fortunately, it’s more than 600 light years away, so when it does explode we won’t get any stellar shrapnel or fallout.

Right in the middle of Orion is the hunter’s calling card, the three stars that neatly line up in a row that make up Orion’s Belt. Nowhere else in the sky anywhere in the world will you see a more perfect alignment of stars that are this bright.

From the lower left to the upper right are Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka. You would think that these stars are physically related but that’s just not the case, not even close. They have nothing to do with each other astronomically. They’re actually hundreds of light years apart. Their arrangement in our sky from our vantage point on Earth is purely accidental, although sometimes I wonder.

All three stars are much larger than our sun and are unique in their own ways.

The largest of the trio is Alnilam, an Arabic name that roughly translates to English as “string of pearls.” That certainly seems appropriate. It’s so far away that even if you could travel at the speed of light, 186,300 miles a second, which Albert Einstein claimed is impossible, it would take you more than 1,300 years to reach Alnilam.

It’s almost 30 times the diameter of our sun. It’s a very hot star with temperatures well over 40,000 degree Fahrenheit. Our sun, by comparison, is 10,000 degrees at its outer layer. What really amazes me is that Alnilam kicks out nearly 400,000 times more light than our sun. It’s a real shiner for sure. If it were 13 light years away instead of 1,300 light years, it would easily be the brightest star in our sky. You’d even see Alnilam in broad daylight.

Alnitak, on the lower left side of Orion’s belt, is an Arabic name that means “the belt”; it’s the second largest of the three stars. This giant nuclear fusion gas ball is nearly two million miles in girth, and is even hotter than Alnilam with a temperature possibly more than 45,000 degrees.

Traveling to Alnitak would require a journey of a little over 800 light years. By the way, just one light-year equals almost six trillion miles. Alnitak’s also a real shiner, with a luminosity almost 200,000 times that of our puny little sun.

There’s also more than meets the eye when you see Alnitak. It’s actually part of its own little three-star family. Alnitak has two smaller companion stars and all three stars orbit each other.

There’s no way you can see Alnitak’s companion stars with the naked eye. Actually, that’s very common in our night sky. A lot of stars that appear as a single star may be part of a multistar family with all of the stars orbiting each other. If you were on a planet around one of these stars you would have multiple suns in your sky.

Mintaka, at just over 900 light years away, is on the upper right hand side of the belt. It’s about the same size as Alnitak, and is another very hot star with a surface temperature of possibly more than 40,000 degrees.

Just as with Alnitak, Mintaka is another multiple star system made up of at least two stars orbiting and eclipsing each other. As the two stars pass in front of each other the combined brightness we see does vary a bit over time.

Well that’s it, the three stars that make up Orion’s belt, one of the true jewels of the sky. All three of these stars vary in their sizes, power output, temperature and more; yet all three stars line up neatly in our sky with nearly identical brightness.

Another heavenly gem is on the rise to the far lower left of Orion in the low eastern skies, the planet Jupiter, appearing near the constellation Leo the Lion. Jupiter is about 400 million miles from us at its closest approach to Earth, or should I more properly say the Earth and Jupiter are at their closest approach to each other. Next week I’ll have much more on the king of the planets in our solar system, just one of billions and billions in our Milky Way galaxy.

Celestial hugging

The Venus-Mars show is getting better and better in the low southwestern sky shortly after evening twilight. Venus and Mars, the planets named after the Roman god of love and the Roman god of war, respectively, are now within three degrees of each other and are the brightest starlike objects in that part of the sky.

Because of Mars’ distance and Venus’ thick cloud cover there’s not much to see with a telescope, but it’s great candy to the naked eye. On Friday night, the new crescent moon will join Venus and Mars to make a really spectacular spectacle. This weekend Mars and Venus will draw even closer to each other.

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 and at www.adventurepublications.net.