Caoimhín's Content

This video is very much an Irish discussion of roughly the same topics dealt with in the last English language video, what we can see in November. However, it isn’t a word for word translation, every video is a little different, even if they broadly deal with the same subjects.

For a start, this video begins with a brief tangent into Irish months and seasons. Different people define the seasons differently, what you call the summer months may not be summer for everyone. In the Irish language, “Fómhar” means autumn or fall, or really “harvest”, for the harvest season. The Irish for September and October are “Méan Fómhair” and “Deireadh Fómhair” respectively, the middle of autumn and the end of autumn. After the end of autumn of course we have winter or “Geimhreadh”, beginning with November or “Samhain”. You might recognize “Samhain” as Halloween, but in Irish, Halloween is “Oíche Shamna”, November Night or November’s Eve. November is usually said as “Mí na Shamna”, the month of November. So, according to the Irish names of the months, winter has begun!

One of the most noticeable things about the night sky at this time of the year, for those of us in the right places, is how early the night sky appears. We are getting dark as early as 7:30pm! This effect is more obvious closer to the poles, with days getting shorter and nights getting longer as we move into winter. Of course, this is great for astronomy, it lets you see the stars for longer and catch interesting things earlier. The difference practically disappears if you are at the equator.

Both Jupiter and Saturn are still with us in the evening, Jupiter having just passed it’s opposition, so it’s very bright and clear in the sky. Pegasus is briefly pointed out, straight into the south early in the night for this month, but we will deal with constellations this month more in a later video. We want to see the planet which is coming up to opposition, Uranus. Right between the Pleiades or Seven Sisters, who’ve featured in previous videos, and Jupiter is where you’ll find it. Unfortunately, Uranus isn’t visible to the naked eye, luckily we aren’t limited by that when we are using Stellarium.

We take a closer look at Uranus, revealing its faint rings and many moons. Unlike most of the other moons in the solar system, the moons of Uranus are not named after beings from classical mythology, at least not directly, but after characters from English literature, particularly the works of Shakespeare.

Moving onwards towards morning time, I do briefly point out Venus in the constellation of Virgo. The letter “V” as a comparatively new addition to the Irish alphabet, the sound doesn’t normally occur on its own. Usually, the sound comes from a mutated, or lenited, version of “m” or “b”, written with a “h” like the “mh” in “Caoimhín”. Of course, when words from English that had a “v” in them were borrowed into Irish, the letter eventually got adopted, like in “várdrús”, the Irish for wardrobe.

Neither Venus nor Virgo will be our focus here, but Leo, thanks to the upcoming Leonid Meteor Shower. On the 17th and 18th of November, the Earth is moving through a trail of dust and rock left behind by a comet. It is those little pices of dust and rock falling through the air that burn up, giving us what many call “shooting stars”. There are always a few shooting stars, space is mostly empty but there is some dust and rock out there. However, when we move through certain parts of our orbit, we see way more and that is what we call a meteor shower. The amount of meteors zipping across the sky can go from just 10 or so an hour to hundreds or even thousands.

Some meteor showers are more impressive than others, and an exceptional Leonid shower can be very impressive, producing thousands and thousands of meteors, but this isn’t always the case. There can be a lot of variation from year to year, and some meteors showers are never produce as many as the Leonids sometimes can. On the other hand, just because a meteor shower was impressive one year doesn’t mean it will be just as good the next year. Complex interactions between the comet, its tail and the gravity of other planets like Jupiter can have a huge impact on what we actually get to see.

What makes the meteors we see here Leonids? Really, its the trail of dust they come from, but given that they burn up that can be hard to tell. There is a way to tell, which is to trace them back. If you follow the tail of the shooting star back across the sky, it should come back to Leo, even if it appeared in a different part of the sky. This can be hard if Leo isn’t above the horizon, which it doesn’t need to be for the meteors to be visible.

In the linked video we get to see what an exceptional rate would look like, but even a much lower Leonid rate will still add to the background rate, giving us a better chance of seeing something, even better if you are in a dark clear sky.

With the Leonids, I quickly recap that the planets will be visible, but failing an eclipse or a conjunction, a meteor shower will often be the most visually impressive thing to happen in a given month. I hope you’ll meet me back here to talk about eclipses in the next post.