When the year opens, the bright company of planets that lit up the southwestern sky through November and a part of December will have dispersed. Venus alone will remain conspicuous, Jupiter and Saturn being too low in the west and too near the sun. Saturn comes up with the sun on the 9th, and Jupiter on the 15th of the month.

Venus draws slowly eastward until the 22d, when she becomes stationary; she attains her greatest brilliancy on the 9th. After the 22d, she turns westward and approaches the sun with apparently increasihg rapidity. Mercury passes the sun on the farther side at the beginning of the month, and moves eastward, but in low south latitude ; it does not reach its greatest eastern elongation until the 1st of February, and then will be so far south that it will be difficult, if not impossible, to pick up.

The moon reaches her last quarter on the first day of the month, is in conjunction with Uranus on the 6th, and new on the 9th; she passes Mercury and Mars on the 9th, and Venus on the 12th. She comes to the first quarter on the 17th, fulls on the 23d, and leaves the month as she entered it, at her last quarter.

On the 19th, at about eleven o'clock in the evening, there will be an occultation of the star Epsilon Tauri by the moon; at Washington the star will be hidden for about an hour and ten minutes, here for a rather less time. Such a phenomenon is very interesting to watch ; the gradual approach of the moon to the star, and its sudden disappearance behind the invisible dark limb of the moon may be easily watched with a field-glass or small telescope, as the star is between the third and fourth magnitudes.

By Jan. 1 the summer constellations will have mostly disappeared; at eight o'clock in the evening Lyra will be on the northwestern horizon, and Cygnus following just above it.

But the eastern sky will be bright with the winter stars; the Great Dipper will have swung around into the northeast, and with Auriga and Perseus above it, Gemini, Taurus, Cetus, Orion and the two Dogs to the southward, and Cassio-pea overhead, will make the eastern half of the sky luminous. The greater and lesser Dogs add each its first magnitude star, so that there will be eight of these in sight, though Vega is on the verge of setting.

I am often asked how to identify these constellations. Each of them has its own configuration of stars, as characteristic as the features of a man's face, and once these are familiarized they are never forgotten. Among the most characteristic of these are the Great Dipper of Ursa Major, the W group of Cassiopea, the belt and sword of Orion, the Hyades and the Pleiades in Taurus.

The easiest way to locate these roughly is perhaps by the use of a planisphere, such as can be bought from a dollar, and perhaps less, to three dollars, and which can be set at any given minute of the year. For more details, an atlas is useful, such as Klein's, Schurig's, or Upton's, which may be purchased for moderate prices at any shop where maps are sold.

With any of these, or a good celestial globe, by carefully studying the configurations and alignments of the brighter stars, the reader can in a short time become as much at home among the constellations as are most astronomers. It is a simple matter of the memory of the eye, and once learned is never forgotten.

Vega.