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Full Transcript below

Dr Ian ‘Astroblog’ Musgrave returns with your essential guide to the November night sky, including a daylight occultation of Jupiter on the 3rd, Mars and Jupiter one degree apart on the 16th, Uranus at opposition on the 26th, and the Leonid meteor shower on the 18th. Venus returns to the morning sky alongside Spica, Saturn still graces the evening, and the Full Moon on the 25th is almost, but not quite, a perigee Moon.

In the Tangent, Ian looks at why the Leonids are so famous for their spectacular storms in 1833, 1966, 1999, 2001 and 2002, and how new models of the dust trails from Comet 55P/Tempel–Tuttle predict storm conditions in 2033 and 2034 and a strong outburst in 2035. When we watch a meteor shower, we are seeing the memories of comets past.

In This Episode

• Moon Phases: Last Quarter (Nov 2), New Moon (Nov 9), First Quarter (Nov 17), Full Moon (Nov 25), plus apogee (Nov 14) and perigee (Nov 26)
• Evening Skies: Mercury lost in the twilight, and Saturn highest between 9 and 11 p.m., with the Moon nearby on the 20th
• Morning Skies: Venus returns beside Spica and reaches greatest brilliancy on the 30th, the crescent Moon passes Venus and Spica, and Mars and Jupiter draw together in Leo
• Daylight Occultation of Jupiter (Nov 3): how to watch Jupiter and its moons disappear and reappear behind the Moon, and how to stay safe with the Sun in the sky
• Uranus at Opposition (Nov 26): how to find it between the Pleiades and the Hyades
• T Coronae Borealis: still waiting
• The Leonid Meteor Shower (Nov 18): a quiet year, and why Australian observers will see so few
• Southern Skies: Orion, Canis Major, Carina, Puppis and Vela rising earlier
• The Tangent: Leonid storms, how the dust trails of 55P/Tempel–Tuttle are modelled, and the storms predicted for 2033–2035

November Highlights

Morning Sky:

02 November: Last Quarter Moon
03 November: Moon between Mars and Jupiter in the morning
03 November: Daylight occultation of Jupiter by the Moon (most of Australia except far north Queensland)
07 November: Waning crescent Moon near Venus and Spica, low on the horizon
09 November: New Moon
14 November: Moon at apogee
16 November: Mars and Jupiter about 1° apart
17 November: First Quarter Moon
18 November: Leonid meteor shower (low rates)
25 November: Mars about 2° from Spica, forming a triangle with Jupiter
30 November: Venus at greatest brilliancy (magnitude −4.6)

Evening Sky:

20 November: Waxing Moon 8° from Saturn
25 November: Full Moon
26 November: Uranus at opposition (magnitude 5.6, between the Pleiades and the Hyades)
26 November: Moon at perigee.

Full Transcript: Introduction

Welcome to episode 245 of Astrophiz. My name is Brendan O’Brien and Astrophiz is produced on Yorta Yorta, Pangarang and Kaurna country. We celebrate and honour the first astronomers of this land, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

Twice monthly, we explore the universe with the world’s leading scientists. For transcripts and more, visit Astrophiz.com.

And here is Dr Ian Musgrave with your November SkyGuide.

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Brendan: Hello, Ian.

Ian: Hello, Brendan.

Brendan: Great to be speaking with you again, Ian. And can you tell us, mate, what’s up in the sky for the month of November?

Ian: Well, there’s going to be lots of interesting things in the sky in the month of November. With the loss of Mercury in the first week of November, most of the planetary action is going to be happening in the morning. So yes, you will have to get up quite early to see some of the spectacular things.

Of course, Saturn will still be there in the evening to liven up your skies. Also, Uranus comes to opposition, and we’ve got some nice planetary close approaches, so that’s really good.
We’ve got the Leonid meteor shower, but sadly that’s going to be very unexciting.

The November Moon Phases

Ian: So I’ll start off, as I do, with the Moon. On the 2nd of November is the Last Quarter Moon, which is really good for stargazing.

On November the 3rd, there is a daylight occultation of the planet Jupiter. This will be very interesting to see, but you do have to be careful about observing it because, of course, the Sun’s out. I’ll talk about that a little bit later.

Then on November the 9th, you’ve got the New Moon, which of course is ideal for stargazing the entire night. November the 17th is First Quarter. And then on November the 25th, we have the Full Moon. Now, this is almost a perigee Full Moon. It’s a little bit over 24 hours off, but it’s going to be a harbinger of what we’ll see in December, when we have a proper perigee Full Moon.

Again, the Moon is at apogee, when it’s furthest from the Earth, on November the 14th, and at perigee, when it’s closest to the Earth, on November the 26th. So like I said, Full Moon is November 25, perigee is November 26. It’s almost a perigee Full Moon, but go out and have a look anyway. And if you’ve taken some photographs of the Moon at apogee earlier this year, take some photographs now, and maybe the full perigee Moon in December will be clouded out. This will be close enough. It’ll look interesting.

Brendan: Yep.

Evening Skies: Saturn

Ian: Okay. So let’s go to the sky. Evening sky. Mercury is lost in the twilight in the first week of November. It’s been lowering in the sky, so it’ll be lost very soon.

Saturn is still nice in the north-eastern sky. It’s now getting highest in the sky between 9 p.m. and 11 p.m. local time, so you don’t really have to stay up until the wee small hours to see it. But the downside, if you’re doing telescopic observation as we head closer to summer, is that the warm skies earlier in the evening will give you more turbulence as you’re viewing in the telescope.

And on November the 20th, the waxing Moon is eight degrees from Saturn, so not very close. But if you’re still having a bit of trouble working out where Saturn is, on November the 20th, Saturn is the brightest object close to the Moon.

Morning Skies: Venus, Mars and Jupiter

Ian: Yep. So let’s move to the morning sky, where all sorts of fun things are happening. Venus returns to the morning sky in mid-November, and it’s going to be very close to the bright star Spica. It will remain within two degrees of the star for most of the month.

Now, if you’ve been observing Venus over the past couple of months and seeing it get bigger and thinner and thinner, and you’ve got your telescope out in the early morning, and unlike me you don’t have a giant tree in the way of Venus, you will see Venus start off as a thin crescent and then become progressively half Moon-shaped, and then gibbous over the coming morning months. So that will be very nice to view.

Did you have a chance to look at Venus in binoculars in the last few days before it became close to the horizon?

Brendan: I did, and I caught the crescent.

Ian: Yeah. Well, for those of you who have missed out on the crescent as Venus disappeared into the twilight, here’s another good reason to get up at dark o’clock and look at Venus through binoculars and see the crescent Venus. It will be something that’s really cool.

Venus will be at its greatest brilliancy on the 30th, at magnitude minus 4.6, and maybe you could test whether you can see Venus cast a shadow at that time.

On the 7th, the 28-day waning crescent Moon appears very close to the pair of Venus and Spica, but this will be quite low to the horizon, so you may need a flat, level horizon like the ocean or a desert to be able to see it properly.

But if you look further up, you’ll see the pair of Mars and Jupiter. Now, Mars is rising about 2.30 a.m. in Leo, and Mars forms a line with Jupiter and the bright star Regulus. On the 3rd, the just-past Last Quarter Moon is between Mars and Jupiter. At magnitude 0.8, the red planet is quite obvious.

And if you’re looking at it in a telescope, unlike me, who would have a giant tree right in front of Mars, Venus and Jupiter, it’s quite a clear, gibbous, Moon-shaped view in the telescope. Now, this is not a very good apparition this year, and the opposition of Mars is in 2027, but even in small telescopes you should be able to see Mars’s polar cap.

Over the coming days, Mars and Jupiter move closer together, and on the 16th the pair are about one degree apart, close enough to be in wide-field telescopes. So although Mars will be a reddish dot with a white tip to it, you’ll be able to see Jupiter quite clearly and its panoply of moons. So that should be very interesting to look at.

Even in binoculars, if you just have binoculars, you’ll have a very bright red dot. Jupiter will be an obvious oval, and the moons will be quite obvious too. Again, if you’re looking at planets through binoculars, I really recommend that you get a stand, an adapter so that you can mount your binoculars onto a tripod, so the binoculars are quite steady and you’re not shaking them around as you try to hold them. If you’ve got big binoculars like I have, they’re quite heavy. And even though they’ve got great resolution, because you’re trying to hold still, the view of the planets will be all over the place.

The pair are quite close together, as I said, and look magnificent in binoculars and telescopes. But they also form a neat triangle with Spica, which makes them look really good even if you don’t have binoculars or a telescope.

Now, after this, Mars and Jupiter move apart, with Mars coming closer to Spica. And on the 25th, Mars is about two degrees from Spica and once again forms a triangle with Jupiter. Jupiter is very obviously near Mars, and it’s brighter than Mars, so you have the golden colour of Jupiter contrasting with the red of Mars. It’s rising about 1 a.m. mid-month and is visible in the eastern morning sky in Leo, near Mars, which I just said.

So again, on the 3rd, you’ve got the Moon between Mars and Jupiter, which will look really good in the morning. And then there’s a daytime occultation of Jupiter later on in the 3rd. It’s visible from most of Australia except far north Queensland. I’ll talk about that in a bit more detail later on. And again, as I said before, on the 16th the pair are one degree apart, and everything I said about binoculars and telescopes applies yet again.

Uranus at Opposition

Ian: And finally, we have Uranus. Uranus comes to opposition on the 26th. It’s rising in the early evening sky and is highest about midnight, almost directly between the Pleiades and the Hyades. Uranus is normally visible to the naked eye. Its magnitude is about 5.6. However, it’s typically fairly hard to see unless you’re under dark sky conditions, because most people’s eyes can see down to magnitude 6.

Unfortunately, Uranus is currently pretty close to a lot of stars of similar magnitude, so it’s going to be a little bit hard to work out which almost-magnitude-6 object is Uranus. It’s one binocular width from the Pleiades towards the Hyades, so Uranus should be right in the middle, but then there are a lot of stars in there and it can be quite difficult to find.

What you can do is watch that space over a couple of nights, or even over a week, and look for the star that’s moved. That will be Uranus. After this goes out, I’ll put up a chart where you can find Uranus at opposition.

T Coronae Borealis

Ian: So T Coronae Borealis still hasn’t gone bang, and you can’t see it at the moment. But it was very interesting to read how they’re planning to observe neutrinos from T Coronae Borealis when it does go bang. So I’ll bring that up a little bit later.

The Leonid Meteor Shower

Ian: Now, what I’m going to talk about now: the Leonid meteor shower occurs on the 18th of November. Unfortunately, there are not going to be very many meteors. It’s predicted to have an hourly rate of 15 meteors per hour. For us in Australia, that translates to about three meteors per hour, because the radiant is quite low to the horizon. This is not very exciting. Unless you’re a really dedicated meteor observer, I wouldn’t bother.

The Daylight Occultation of Jupiter, November 3

Ian: The occultation of Jupiter on Tuesday the 3rd of November is going to be quite interesting. You’ll see it from most of Australia, not far north Queensland, I’m afraid. Because the occultation occurs in daylight, you have to be very careful to avoid seeing the Sun if you’re using binoculars or a telescope. While Jupiter can be seen through a telescope or binoculars if you know where to look, it’s best to look reasonably close to where Jupiter is going to disappear behind the Moon.

Jupiter will appear as a pale oval, and you’ll also be able to see Jupiter’s moons. What will be quite interesting is that Europa is going to be pretty close to Jupiter when it disappears, so you’ll see Europa go first, then Jupiter. Then the other moons, Io et cetera, disappear behind the Moon in sequence. That’ll look really cool.

And then on the other side, you’ll see Europa come out. Because it’s daylight, you have to work out where Jupiter is going to come out. Then you see Europa come out, and you make sure that you can then see Jupiter come out after that. And then the rest of the moons come out afterwards. So that’ll be really quite cool.

Again, it’ll be very pale because, of course, it’s daylight. It’s occurring roughly around 10 o’clock, depending on where you are. Disappearing at the bright limb might be a bit difficult to see, because the Moon is much brighter than Jupiter, especially during daylight. Reappearing at the dark limb will be very easy to see, because Jupiter’s moons will pop out, and Jupiter itself will start as a chip and then slowly grow. It’ll take about a minute or so for Jupiter to go from completely occulted to completely out.

So this is something that’s really unusual, really interesting. Again, I’ll put out timings, and also put out hints for “do not look at the Sun”. Make sure, wherever you are, you’ve got the Sun behind an object so there’s no chance that it gets into your binoculars or your telescope while you’re observing Jupiter and the Moon.

Brendan: That sounds like quite a challenge.

Ian: It is quite a challenge, but it will be well worth it.

The Southern Skies

Ian: Yep. And of course, with the southern skies, Orion is beginning to rise, as are Canis Major and the stars of Carina, Puppis and Vela. They’re beginning to rise at a decent time. If you’re going to be up in the early hours of the morning, you can see them quite easily, but now they’re starting to rise around about midnight, so you’ve got a good chance to see some of these iconic stars.

I’ll just let you know that, once again, these are fantastic things to see, and you should really make an effort to get outside and look up, especially when the skies are dark. If you’ve got the holidays coming up in a little while, use all the opportunities you can to have a look at the skies and see some really fantastic things.

Brendan: Wonderful. And do you have a tangent for us, Ian?

Ian: I do indeed.

The Tangent: The Leonids and the Memories of Comets Past

Ian: Now, I’ve talked about the Leonid meteors and how they’re going to be pretty sucky this year. But the Leonids are an iconic meteor shower because of their spectacular displays in 1833, 1966, 2001. Who remembers the 2001 Leonids? I was lucky enough to be in Alice Springs in 2001. I could see meteors streaming above my head like rain. It was amazing. And 2002. After that, the Leonids have not been spectacular. And again, this year, three meteors an hour. No one wants to get up for that.

Now, meteor showers are predictable because they’re the dust trails of comets, or, in the case of the Geminids, coming up next month, of an asteroid, Phaethon. And the dust trails follow the orbit of the parent comet. You may think that once the dust trail’s been let go by the comet, you’ll see the comet with a spectacular tail, and once the tail’s blown away like dust, that’s it. No, the dust still stays on the orbit.

Now, the Leonids are the dusty debris from Comet Tempel–Tuttle. And the next perihelion of the Leonids’ parent comet, 55P/Tempel–Tuttle, don’t you love that name, is due on 2031, May the 20th. Now, the Leonid meteor storms, and some other meteor storms, roughly coincide with the perihelion passage of the comet.

Now, I’ll just say that meteor showers are predictable, as I said before, but meteor storms were, until very recently, generally not. The storms are not due to the dust generated during the most recent passage of the comet, but to older dust streams. For example, the 2001 Leonids were due to dust streams released in 1699, 1767 and 1866.

That’s pretty old. How do we know? Well, we’ve watched the comet. We’ve seen when the dust was released. But to be certain, what we’ve done is model the behaviour of dust emitted at those times. We know the orbit of comet 55P very clearly. We know the gravitational effects on the comet. We know the kinds of dust particles released by the comet. And so we can work out both the gravitational and non-gravitational forces on the dust trails, also the resonance effect of Jupiter. We can also have an estimate of the ejection velocity of dust grains. And there are non-gravitational forces, such as radiation pressure on the dust, that can alter the overall path of the dust from the general orbit of the comet itself. From these models, we can see when the trails will cross the Earth’s path.

Putting all those things together, the predictions were spectacularly successful for 2001 and 2002, where the times of impact were pretty close to predicted. The numbers were only sort of close, but nonetheless, they predicted storms and we got storms. Reviewing about two decades of predictions, we find that the peak times can be routinely predicted to about plus or minus half an hour. That’s pretty good for things that were ejected hundreds of years ago. The rates, yeah, still not so much.

So what prompted this is a new model, which has predicted storm conditions from 2033 to 2034 and a nice shower in 2035. Now, that’s not too far away. This is 2026. It’s not like we’re going to have to wait 10 years. It’s only, okay, seven years. You have to wait seven years for the next Leonid storm, but it will be well worth it. I definitely intend to be around in 2033.

So with this new model, they’ve improved the analysis of the dust ejection sites and fitted it to actual comet observations. There’s also error minimisation, by looking at past predictions and the results of those past predictions, and more detailed and accurate modelling of dust particle behaviour. As a result, they’ve gone back and looked at the predictions of their model for the outbursts of 1833, 1966, 1999, 2001 and 2002, and this model comes up with much better results than the previous predictions. So it seems to be pretty much on track.

Brendan: Nice. So what are the predictions?

Ian: So in 2033, on November the 17th, at around 11 p.m. Universal Time, there’s going to be about 1,400 meteors per hour.

Brendan: Whoa.

Ian: And that timing favours Asia, but it’ll also include us.

Now, 2034 has two peaks. The first peak is on November the 18th, at 3:30 Universal Time, with another 1,400, or perhaps 1,500, meteors per hour, and the timing favours Europe and Africa. We might see the end of that. The second peak is on November the 18th, around midnight UTC, with a lower rate of 1,200 meteors per hour, and the timing favours Asia. So Europe and Africa get a meteor storm two nights in a row. [unclear: We get covered in the Europe sections.]

So we get two years where we get decent meteor storms, both above 1,000 meteors per hour. In 2035, there’s no storm, but you’ve still got a strong outburst on November the 19th at about 14:16 UT, where the hourly rate is only, only 650 meteors per hour. Considering that the Geminids are running at between 150 and 200 meteors per hour, that’s not shabby. The timing favours the Far East.

So there you go. Coming up, we’ve got three potentially good displays, two of which will be under storm conditions, and one of which will be quite high. And it’s amazing to think that what we saw back in 2001 and 2002, and in 1999, for those of you who went out in 1999 and stayed up, those were different displays we saw, and potentially we’ll see them again from particles that were released centuries ago. They’re predicting that the 2033 storm is probably due to particles that were released from the comet in 1833.

So when we look at the stars, we’re seeing ancient light. When we look at the meteor showers, we’re seeing the memories of comets past. The faded traces of a tail that was spectacular centuries ago, but whose fading remnants are once again putting on a display as they burn across the sky and into our imaginations.

Brendan: Fantastic, Ian. Worth putting in the calendar.

Ian: Very definitely putting in the calendar for six years hence.

Brendan: Well, thank you very much, Ian ‘Astroblog’ Musgrave. A great month coming up, and something to look forward to for years to come.

Ian: Indeed, indeed. So we’ve got lots of exciting things happening, and it’s well worth it. Just the sky itself will be beautiful, as well as seeing Mars and Jupiter coming together and then having the Moon shoot by them. You’ll also have Orion, Gemini, the Pleiades, all that to keep you company, and the magnificent constellation of the Keel rising in the sky. It can be painful, but it’s going to be well worth getting up that early in the morning.

Brendan: Excellent. Step out, look up, take the kids, take the grandkids, have a fabulous time. Thank you, Ian.

Ian: Thank you, Brendan.

Brendan: Good night, mate.

Ian: Good night, Brendan. We’ll catch you later.

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And in two weeks’ time, we have a first for Astrophiz. I’m speaking with two guests at once. Marnie Ogg is the founder of the Australasian Dark Sky Alliance, which does amazing work, and she’s the director of Dark Sky Traveller. She has spent nearly 30 years connecting people with the night sky in more than 80 countries. And seated beside Marnie will be Professor Fred Watson. Fred is Australia’s Astronomer at Large, a much-loved author and broadcaster, and a prolific research astronomer whose long and illustrious career has been closely tied to the Anglo-Australian Telescope at Siding Spring.

Fred and Marnie are partners in life and share a passion for dark skies, and they’ve also worked together on the audio tour for the Virtual Solar System Drive near Coonabarabran, a concept Fred helped develop as a member of the original committee. You’re going to love their story, so tune in. Or better still, subscribe to the Astrophiz podcast.

And remember, Astrophiz is free, ad-free, and unsponsored. Find us on Astrophiz.com or your favourite social media platform. Keep looking up. Clear skies.

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