Winter strollers and wayfarers have always been drawn to look up, to gaze through puffs of breath at galleries of glittering stars set against deep, black night.

Unnumbered sparks. Candles of the night. Love’s harbingers. God’s dreams. Poets revel in the stellar bounty of the heavens.

Such immensity inspires in mortals a becoming humility, provokes wonder or reflection on the infinite, the divine — in winter, most of all. For there was, famously, a most auspicious star that reportedly led three dignitaries to Jerusalem two millennia ago to pay homage to an infant.

The story of it changed humanity’s course, and infused the night skies of winter with power beyond reckoning.

Two thousand years on, Northern Hemisphere winters remain especially compelling for the simple reasons that there is more nighttime darkness than in summer, the skies — when clear — are drier and crisper, and there actually are more stars to see.

Paul Mortfield, director of the David Dunlap Observatory in Richmond Hill, was one of three learned gents the Star consulted about the pleasures of the winter sky.

One of the great rewards, said Mortfield, is the visibility of the constellation Orion (The Hunter), its three bright “belt stars” and the smeary nebula, the big glowing cloud of gas where new stars are being born.

“It’s really bright and an easy object to find,” he said. “And you’re looking at a stellar nursery.

“There’s also a little, tight grouping of stars called the Pleiades — or the Seven Sisters,” said Mortfield, who earned a physics degree at York University before working for 20 years with NASA in California.

“The coolest thing about that is that the Japanese name for that little tiny cluster, which you can see with your naked eye, is Subaru. And if you look at the emblem on the back of a Subaru, that’s the Pleiades.”

Michael Williams, who runs the planetarium at the University of Toronto, said the “atmosphere’s a little more stable in winter, and with cold air there’s less twinkling of the stars, so they look brighter.” There are also splashes of colour to be seen.

Williams said Orion, which chases Taurus (The Bull) across the sky, has a red “supergiant” star for one of his shoulders and a blue supergiant for one of his knees, all of which should be discernible on clear winter nights to the naked eye.

Randy Attwood fell in love with the wonders above him as a boy during the summer of 1969, when man first landed on the moon.

After a career in information technology and a half-century as an amateur astronomer, during which he had an asteroid named after him, Attwood is now executive-director of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada (RASC).

“Generally, when people are out for a walk, and it’s clear, and they look up at the sky, they tend to think that the stars are brighter in the winter, or they seem crisper or easier to see,” he said.

Without midsummer humidity, there is what astronomy buffs call “transparency to the skies,” he explained. “The colder air just seems to crisp things up.”

There are more and different stars than are visible during summer, Attwood said.

“The most popular famous constellations in winter are Orion, Gemini and Taurus. There’s Canis Major and Canis Minor (the dog stars). There’s a whole series of these constellations close together.”

In the city, as with all major urban areas, astronomers fight light pollution, he said, which brightens the background skies and makes it difficult to see fainter stars. So RASC’s Toronto office organizes observing sessions an hour or 90 minutes by car outside the city in places like provincial parks.

Even at that, cloud cover thwarts telescopes and cameras turned skywards. “It’s very frustrating if you’re a skywatcher,” Attwood said. “Essentially from October to March, things are pretty cloudy in this area.”

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As for the fabled Star of Bethlehem?

Well, it is possible to get software now that shows what the skies were like 2,000 or so years ago, Attwood said, and nothing remarkable shows up in the way of dramatic transient events to conclusively explain the famous phenomenon.

It could have been one of several things, he surmised.

Usually, if something really bright is visible in the eastern sky it’s a planet, he said. “In the winter time, there’s a really bright object in the east not long after sunset and that’s Jupiter.”

It could be, he said, that Jupiter and Saturn aligned in such a way that they seemed to the naked eye to be one star of particular brightness.

In theory, though there’s no record of such happenings around the time in question, it could have been stars blowing up in novas or supernovas.

As for Mortfield, “I wasn’t there,” he deadpans.

“So I basically keep out of that stuff.”

Wise man, indeed.

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