February 2026 Stargazing Guide

And away we go.

Greetings, junior scientists, scientists, and citizens of this great big, weird, wild, and wonderful world in which we live.
As always, I'm your humble science communicator, the great Orbax, coming to you from the Department of Physics here at the University of Guelph and I'd like to welcome you to our February 2026 Star Gazing Guide.

So, it's winter and it's been a pretty rough one, too. If you're counting the days until summer, I've got some good news for you. Our daylight hours are getting longer with sunrise moving from 7:37 a.m. on the 1st to 6:59 a.m. on the 28th.
And sunset shifts back from 5:33 p.m. at the beginning of the month to 6:09 p.m. by the end.
Now, each and every month, I tell you about all the incredible things that we can see in our night sky.
And for the last eight weeks or so, you may have noticed that our night skies predominantly look like this,

or this,

or even this.

So, this month, I thought, why not change things up?
Instead of looking towards the stars through a veil of clouds, let's pierce that canopy and blast off towards one of our planet's best friends, the Moon!
That's right.
This month is our Artemis II special.
It's time for us to learn about this historic mission back to the Moon.

And all we have to do is take some time

and look up.

Few would argue that one of our most memorable achievements in our shared history was putting human beings on the surface of the moon.

That's one small step for man,
one giant leap for mankind.

But since 1972's Apollo 17 mission, no human being has so much as traveled even past low Earth orbit.
The Artemis missions will not only send humanity back to the Moon, but it'll create a formal ongoing lunar presence with a moon orbiting space station known as the Gateway and a base on the Moon's surface.
Artemis I launched back in November of 2022.
This uncrewed flight was a test of the Space Launch Systems (SLS) rocket and the Orion spacecraft and was the first phase of many before we set foot back on the lunar surface.
The Artemis II mission will use the SLS to propel Orion,
now with a crew of four astronauts,
around the far side of the Moon.

A journey of over 1 million km taking over 10 days to complete
and potentially launches this month with the first flight window taking place from February 6th to the 11th.
If they're unable to launch during this window, the next opportunity will be the first week of March.
And if that fails, the next opportunity could be the first week of April.
Now, not only is this exciting for humanity,
but it's of particular interest to us here in Canada.

Did you know that only American astronauts have ever been to the moon?

Well, that's about to change as Canada is about to become the second nation in history to have an astronaut in lunar proximity as Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen travels aboard Artemis II.
Canada is actually heavily involved with the Artemis project.
A Canadian company has developed lunar rovers which will be deployed to the moon's south pole to search for water ice and Canadarm3 will not only help the orbiting lunar space station Gateway to load and offload large payloads,
but it'll actually help in the construction of the Gateway itself.
So let's assume that Artemis II launches within this window in the next few weeks.

What should you expect to see?

After the SLS launches Orion into space it will then jettison its booster rockets and multiple stages, leaving the Orion and upper stage to orbit Earth, ensuring that all systems are working perfectly.
This will include manual handling of the Orion craft by the astronauts on board.
Once the upper stage has been ejected and the tests are complete, after two Earth orbits, Orion will undergo a maneuver known as
Trans Lunar Injection
to slingshot around the Earth and head off towards the Moon.
This journey will take about 4 days and will take them around 7,500 km past the far side of the Moon and using Earth's gravity will begin a 4-day journey home.
Over the course of their journey, the crew will release four international cube satellites from Argentina, Germany, Korea, and Saudi Arabia.
Astronaut health will be monitored and studied,
something that we haven't been able to do this deep into space since the 1970s,
and perhaps most inspiring, the crew will see parts of the far side of the Moon that have never been seen by human eyes.

This journey back to the Moon,
to create an enduring lunar presence,
is also a journey of collaboration and trust between nations.
During my lifetime, we've never returned to the Moon,
and here we are on the edge of a new beginning of lunar adventures.
Our future will be about humanity living off-world.
The way we do science, the way we handle logistics, the way we even think about ourselves will have to be reinvented.
For perhaps we'll no longer be simply earthlings.
Perhaps we'll be a species scattered amongst the stars.

But the only way we'll ever know is if we take some time...

to look up.

See you next month, junior scientists, and don't forget to have a science-tastic day.

Special thanks to the Royal City Science's own planetary geochemist, Dr. Glynis Perrett, for her help in preparing our Star Gazing Guide

and the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada.