Venus and Saturn at the end of November.
Well its November, its cold, its wet, its windy and the day suddenly seems a lot shorter but those are the negatives, on the plus side everything rises and sets an hour earlier, Orion is now fully exposed by 10pm in the east, a welcome sight after the star-poor skies of October. And apart from Jupiter that’s about it for this week, but Novem
ber as a whole isn’t too bad.
But looking at this week first, we still have Jupiter very bright and due south around 9pm. Venus is back in the dawn sky barely rising by 7am. But it’s much improved by the end of the month, when it rises before 5 and by 7 it will be well above the SE horizon not far from Saturn and the moon, very bright and unmissable. And if you’re out and about between 6 and 7am you can see Saturn in the S E fairly, but not overly bright.
We still have comet Hartley II, though I’ve given up on it, it’s over in the east around midnight just to the east of Gemini passing through Canis Minor, if you want to try for it I’ve put a guide on the blog, but if you can’t be bothered then let NASA do the leg work. On Friday morning NASA's EPOXI mission, which has nothing to do with glue, flies within about 450 miles of the nucleus of Comet Hartley 2, taking pictures all the way. The best resolution should be just 7 meters per pixel on the nucleus's landscape. You can watch the coverage live on NASA TV.
November holds two respectable meteor showers and a chance to three bright planets during the night. The Taurid meteor shower is active through the middle of November. This shower holds few meteors, just 6 per hour on average. But the meteors are much brighter than average. Another meteor shower, the Leonids, peaks during the early morning of November 17. This brief shower has been known for sudden dramatic outbursts, also called meteor storms. But the Leonids have been pretty quiet these past few years. You might see 25-50 meteors per hour before dawn. I’ll tell you how to find them next week.
And as you will all know we’re in Scorpio now, which is my birth sign, the 20th of November if you’re panning any lavish gifts though cash is preferred. Which means that Scorpio is one constellation you won’t see at the moment because that’s where the sun is.
And that was your night sky for the week ending on the 3rd anniversary of the German Bundestag passing the controversial data retention bill mandating storage of citizens' telecommunications traffic data for six months without probable cause.
