November can be a bleak month here in New England with the fall foliage fading out and the longer and colder nights setting in as the daylight and warmth of the first half of fall slowly ebbs away. However, there is always so much beauty in the night sky to inspire us and this month is no exception.
The highlights for this month include Jupiter getting higher and brighter and closer each night as it approaches its opposition on Dec. 7. This will be Jupiter’s best apparition in a decade. Mars is also getting higher, brighter and larger each evening as we are catching up with the red planet in our faster orbit around the sun. Mars will reach its own opposition early next year. Our other next-door neighbor, Venus, is also getting higher, brighter and closer in our evening sky each night as it is catching up with us in its faster orbit around the sun.
Mercury will join Venus as an evening planet for part of this month and Saturn is slowly fading as it gets farther away, but it is still well placed for viewing in the night sky in Aquarius for the rest of the year. Comet C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS) is still visible in Ophiuchus the serpent-bearer and heading into Aquila the Eagle as it passes near some open star clusters. It will probably fade to eighth magnitude by the end of the month so you will need binoculars to see it, but now you can still see it without any optical aid since it is glowing at about fifth magnitude. It reached 3.7 magnitude at its brightest last month. The last major highlight this month will be the annual Leonid meteor shower which peaks on Nov. 17 but is active nearly all month from Nov. 6-Nov. 30.
When you look at Jupiter in Taurus for the rest of this year remember that we just successfully launched a $5 billion spacecraft called the Europa Clipper. It is the size of a basketball court and has nine scientific instruments on board that will give us a lot of great new information about the potential for life in its ocean under the 4-mile-thick crust of ice cover. Europa has about twice as much water under its surface as all of the water in Earth’s oceans combined. It will get there in 2030 after a 1.8-billion-mile journey. The clipper will get as close as just 16 miles above the surface of Europa as it orbits this moon, which is a little smaller than ours. The mission will last at least four years, but they often work far longer than expected.
This mission will work nicely with the JUICE mission that was launched on April 14 of last year and will get there in 2031. This mission, created by the ESA (European Space Agency), will cost $1.7 billion and is the first interplanetary spacecraft to the outer solar system that was not launched by NASA. It stands for Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer. It will study Ganymede, Callisto, and Europa, all three of which have liquid oceans under their surfaces. It will hopefully determine if any life, as we know it, is possible on any of these three large moons.
Then we still have the JUNO mission orbiting Jupiter which arrived there on July 4, 2016. Its mission got extended through September of 2025. After that it will intentionally crash into the atmosphere of Jupiter similar to crashing Cassini into Saturn. Juno’s mission is to better understand the origin and evolution of our largest planet. If you look at Jupiter with a pair of binoculars you can see all four of these large Galilean moons. Three of them, Ganymede, Europa, and Io are in a perfect 1-2-4 resonance. For every one orbit that Ganymede makes, Europa will make two orbits and Io will make four orbits. Callisto used to be in that resonance also, but no longer is now.
Mars starts the month rising at 11:30 p.m. in Cancer the Crab. It will double in brightness by the end of the month and rise at 8:30 p.m. Then it will double in brightness again next month and reach opposition on Jan. 16 of next year when it will rise exactly at sunset and stay up all night long. Venus is getting brighter and higher and closer to us in the evening sky every night now as it is catching up with us in its faster orbit around the sun. It is also getting less illuminated by the sun even as it is still getting brighter because it is also getting closer to us. It will be 68% illuminated and it will not set until two hours after sunset by the end of the month.
By contrast to those last three planets which are each getting closer and brighter, Saturn is getting a little fainter and farther away each night. It is now nearly 100 times fainter than Venus, but still at about 35 degrees high in the constellation of Aquarius the water-bearer. It has a slightly golden glow and in a telescope you will notice that its rings are very thin now, only tilted at about 4 degrees to our plane. They will disappear completely for a while in March of next year before they open up again. Mercury will be visible throughout the first half of this month low in the southwestern sky until an hour after sunset below and to the right of Venus in Sagittarius.
The Leonid meteor shower peaks on on the night of Nov. 17 into the morning of Nov. 18. Its maximum rate is only about 10 meteors per hour from a dark sky site, but this year it will be worse because the moon is full on Nov. 15 and will rise about an hour after sunset on Nov. 17 to spoil the rest of the show. Meteor showers are usually better after midnight, and the moon will be quite high by then.
Caused by Comet 55P/Tempel-Tuttle, this shower can be really spectacular every 33 years when this comet gets near the sun again. This last happened in 1998 and we had several great years of meteors from this shower after that date since there was much more new debris in its orbit now when the earth passed through it right after the comet shed so much more debris into this field from its last pass.
I well remember the Nov. 18, 2001 Leonid meteor shower. We had just built our new observatory in Kennebunk the year before and about 30 of us gathered there on a bitterly cold night to enjoy this great icy display of nature’s power. We saw nearly 1,000 meteors per hour for the entire night, which qualifies as a meteor “storm.” I saw up to seven meteors in one second emanating from Leo and there was not a single lull longer than 10 seconds all night long. That averages out to one meteor every 3.6 seconds. We also saw 15 or so brilliant bolides that lit up the entire night sky with a flash of light so bright that the whole landscape stood frozen in light as if a giant flash bulb on a huge camera in the sky went off to take a picture of this fantastic scene from above. The long slowly twisting smoky trails from these fireballs where then crossed by several shorter meteors, as if we were in the middle of the most powerful firework display you could ever imagine. Most of these meteors were smaller than a grain of sand they burned up around 70 miles high in our atmosphere, which is technically where space begins, called the Karman line. Above that the atmosphere is so thin that it will be black in the middle of the day since there are no more air molecules to scatter out the sunlight and give us the blue sky we are so used to.
Watching this incredible meteor shower for over four hours that night gave me my first and only time that I could actually sense the continual motion of the earth around the sun which is 18.6 miles per second, or 67,000 miles per hour. You can sense the much slower rotation of the earth on its axis very easily by watching the full moon rise or just looking at something through a telescope that is not tracking, but it is nearly impossible to sense the much faster revolution of the earth around the sun because there is nothing there to give us a sense of this incredibly fast motion through space unless we are running into a huge field of meteors like we did that memorable morning.
NOVEMBER HIGHLIGHTS
Nov. 1: New moon is at 8:47 a.m.
Nov. 3: Daylight saving time ends this morning at 2 a.m. The moon passes 2 degrees south of Mercury this evening. The Russians launched Sputnik 2 in 1957. It was the first rocket to carry a living creature into space, a dog named Laika.
Nov. 4: The moon passes 3 degrees south of Venus this evening.
Nov. 6: In 1572 Tycho Brahe saw a supernova in Cassiopeia without a telescope.
Nov. 8: Edmund Halley was born in 1656. I first saw his comet on this day in 1985
Nov. 9: Carl Sagan was born in 1934. First quarter moon is at 12:55 a.m.
Nov. 10: The moon passes less than one degree north of Saturn this evening.
Nov. 15: Full moon is at 4:29 p.m. This is also known as the Beaver or Frosty moon. William Herschel was born in 1738. He discovered the planet Uranus on March 13, 1781.
Nov. 16: Saturn is stationary, ending its retrograde motion in Aquarius and returning to its normal direct or eastward motion again against the fixed background of stars.
Nov. 17: The Leonid meteor shower peaks tonight. The moon passes 6 degrees north of Jupiter.
Nov. 20: The moon passes 2 degrees north of Mars tonight. Edwin Hubble was born in 1889.
Nov. 22: Last quarter moon is at 8:28 p.m.
Bernie Reim of Wells is co-director of the Astronomical Society of Northern New England.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
