AstroCal – November 2024
November will be an interesting month to watch the planets dance across the sky, especially Jupiter and Venus. On November 4, Jupiter will rise in the east just before Venus sets in the west. Both will be bright (magnitude -2.8 and -3.9 respectively) so they won’t be hard to see even though they will be close to the opposite horizons. By Nov 16, they will have risen to 5 degrees above the east and west horizons within 1.9 hours of sunset. On that same date, there will be a lineup of six solar system bodies (starting from west to east with Venus): Venus – Saturn – Neptune – Uranus – Moon – Jupiter with the whole line up spanning 162 degrees of the sky. On Nov 30, the Jupiter to Venus array will be 144 degrees across with the pair now being 12 degrees above opposite horizons. This J-V distance will continue to close to 120 degrees (Dec 19) to 90 degrees (Jan 14, 2025) and finally to their closest distance of 61.7 degrees (Feb 27, 2025). After this, Venus will turn back and cross into the morning sky in March.
Mercury will remain a challenge to see in the western sky early in the month. It is hugging the western horizon 35 minutes after sunset just to the right of The Eye of the Scorpion, the reddish star Antares. Look for Mercury to fade from view by the last week of the month.
Saturn seems to be fainter than usual due to the near on edge view we are seeing of its Rings.
With a current tilt of only about 5 degrees to edge on, they are not adding much to our view. When they are at a higher angle of tilt, they add to the planet’s visibility. Early telescope views recorded the Rings as ‘ears’ until resolution was good enough to see the gap between the Rings and the Planet. The complete edge on view of Saturn will take place from March to early May of 2025.
Mars experiences it’s spring Equinox on Nov 12. According to Abram’s Sky Calendar, “The northern polar region appears very bright and large, as the North Polar Hood (cloud cover) breaks up and reveals the North Polar Cap of frozen CO2 and water underneath. In addition, look for Mars’ dark surface feature, Syrtis Major near the center of Mars’ disk about 38-39 minutes later each day beginning on Nov 9 at 12:25 am EST.
The month begins a new Lunar Cycle with a New Moon on Nov 1. The First Quarter will take place on Nov 8, the Full Moon on Nov 15 and the Third Quarter on Nov 22. Those sky watchers in the PST zone will actually see a second New Moon in November (on Nov 30) while those of us in the EST zone will mark the new cycle in the early morning hours of Dec 1. The Moon will be doing a little dance of its own with other celestial objects between Nov 3 and Nov 17. On Nov 3, the very young Crescent Moon near the western horizon will be just below Antares and then move to just below Venus on Nov 4. The rest of this period will show the Moon passing Venus, Saturn, The Pleiades, Aldebaran and Jupiter. Some stars of The Pleiades will be occulted by the Moon overnight on Nov 15-16. On Nov 27m Spica will be covered by the Moon’s bright edge at 5:30 a.m. EST and the Moon’s earthlight side will uncover the star at 6:40 a.m. EST.
Our historical astronomical event involves the space probe Pioneer 10. Although it was launched on March 2, 1972, we marked the 50th anniversary of the spacecraft with its November 6, 1973 to January 2, 1974 close approach to Jupiter. The photos sent back to Earth far surpassed any telescopic view taken previous to this close flyby. Pioneer 10 garnered many other bragging rights on this flight: It was the first human-made object to traverse the Asteroid Belt, and the first to pass Neptune. It returned valuable radiation data from Jupiter and showed that the Gas Giant actually radiates more heat than could be accounted for by the amount of sunlight it collects. Pioneer 10 discovered the ionosphere of the Jovian moon Io and determined the densities of the four Galilean Moons. Upon completion of its initial mission, it went on to study solar winds and cosmic rays. As of November of 2023, Pioneer 10 was some 12 billion miles (or 134 astronomical units) from the Earth heading in the general direction of Aldebaran in the constellation of Taurus, the Bull which is about 68 light-years away – a trip of some 2 million years for the little ‘satellite that could’.
Compiled by Ken Raisanen of WOAS-FM – information provided by Abrams Planetarium Sky Calendar, Michigan State University. More information and subscription information can be found on their website at http://abramsplanetarium.org/skycalendar/ or on X (formerly Twitter) at http://twitter.com/AbramsSkyNotes. Yearly subscriptions cost $12 and can be started anytime.
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