Today we are taking a look ahead to next weekend to get a preview of the night sky for the night of Halloween, the 31st of October.
The night of Halloween is a little bit of a tautology. Halloween is Hallows Eve, the eve being the the evening, the evening before All Hallows Day. In Irish it’s similar. Oíche Shamhna is the night of Samhain, the night before it starts. Samhain is really the Irish for November. Halloween is really all about the evening, we don’t need to worry too much about sunrise on the 31st, sunset on the 31st into sunrise on the 1st is when we want to focus. Halloween is also at least a useful date for astronomy, as the 1st is halfway between the winter solstice and the autumnal equinox. We’re right in between the end of September and the end of December at the end of October. Samhain is part of a family of dates including Lughnasa, the first of August, Bealtaine, the first of May, and Imbolc, the first of February. Samhain the festival day, is the 1st of November, but the big celebration was the evening beforehand, Oíche Shamhna or All Hallows Eve, now Halloween.
We’re taking a look at the sky just after getting dark, and we already took a look at the constellations that are going to be visible in the sky for this time of year in the last post, so we won’t worry too much about them here. We can see Saturn nice and clear as soon as the sky gets dark. Saturn is going to be with us in the evening for all of November. Uranus will be coming to its opposition in November, keeping it up all night. Uranus is just near the Pleiades at the moment and it is going to be up for most of the night already. Uranus is just in between the Pleiades and the Hyades, right in the middle of Taurus.
We’ll take a quick closer look at Saturn before we get to anything else. I mentioned in a recent video that Jupiter has shadow transits, which are eclipses seen from the outside, they’re when one of the moons casts a shadow on the planet. Smaller moons are often too small and quite close to the planet, so they don’t make a shadow that we can easily see, but when larger moons pass across the right area, they can make a shadow we can see. Saturn rarely has them, despite having more moons, and it looks like over the night of Halloween, we’re not going to get any. No moons large enough are passing across the right plane and that means the moons aren’t going directly between Saturn and the Sun. Saturn has a little bit of a tilt which is visible in the rings. Saturn’s rings are higher at the front at the moment, they’re lower at the back. That does change over time, but it means that the moons, orbiting around Saturn’s equator, they’re higher than Saturn at the front and they’re lower than Saturn at the back. That’s one of the reasons it’s so easy to see Titan. Titan hardly ever goes directly behind Saturn or directly in front of it the way Jupiter’s Galilean moons often do. Jupiter’s moons often disappear from view, whereas the big moons around Saturn disappear from view less often. That also means that they are less often in a position to cast a shadow and generate something like an eclipse. Taking a quick look with a fairly large telescope, 8 inches aperture, will begin to show Saturn’s rings. They are a little bit blurry in Stellarium, but they’re just starting to take shape.
Uranus is a much tougher proposition, it’s a much tougher planet to see, but we are getting to the time of year when it’s in a good position. If we move a little bit later in the night, that will bring the Pleiades nice and high in the sky. That also means Uranus is getting higher in the sky and we can zoom in on Uranus pretty easily with Stellarium. That reveals the moons and the rings, we’re getting a lovely top down view of the rings at the moment. That means that those moons are not going to be able to cast a shadow on Uranus, they’re being lit from above. Because of the way they orbit around Uranus’s equator, they’re not going to get between Uranus and the Sun until Uranus reaches one of its equinoxes, when the Sun is actually shining on the equator instead of practically shining on the pole as it is now. Of course, Uranus does go around the Sun on its side, so it is a little bit different. We can just about see one of Uranus’s moons with a large telescope. A Meade LX 200, with a 16 inch aperture, is the largest that Stellarium simulates and even with all of the help we can get, some of Uranus’s other moons are maybe barely visible. With most telescopes, Uranus is just a tealy blue blob without much detail visible. It is a very distant planet and it’s right on the edge of being visible to the naked eye. It is the planet that some people claim to see with the naked eye, other people believe that it’s not truly possible. We’re getting it at magnitude 5.62 on Halloween, which is definitely within the human range of vision, if you’re in a perfectly dark sky. In a city sky it’s not quite going to be visible.
We have Orion coming up with the moon as we cross from the 31st into the 1st, as we are crossing from Oíche Shamhna, the eve of the 1st of November, into Samhain, the month of November, and Lá Fhéile Samhain, the first day, the festival day, of November. Of course it’s still nighttime, it’s still oíche, and so of course I’d still call it Oíche Shamhna. The traditional dates and festivals didn’t always change at midnight, very often they changed at sunrise or sunset, occasionally at noon. We will push ahead to 3 o’clock in the morning. This is often known as the witching hour. It is considered to be a spooky time of the night most days of the year, but especially so on Halloween. Coming up to 3 o’clock, the witching hour, a great time to tell spooky stories and a great time to take a look at Orion, very nearly due south at this time. Orion has some spooky features, if we start taking a closer look. Just next to Rigel we’ve got the Witch Head Nebula, which is faint but does look like the silhouette of a witch. Up on the left end of Orion’s belt is the Horse’s Head Nebula or the Horsehead Nebula, along with the Burning Bush, or Flame, Nebula. Both of those, and many more clouds of gas, are just at the end of Orion’s belt. The Orion Nebula down in Orion’s Sword is associated with the same molecular cloud, but it doesn’t look particularly spooky. Orion has some nice features where we can zoom in and take a closer look that are fitting to the season.
Coming up to morning time is when we would start to see some of the galaxies in the Virgo group. Also around 3 o’clock, the constellation of Virgo is coming up. It is hard to see, but where Leo ends, Virgo begins quite quickly, the stars in Virgo just aren’t very bright, not until we get to Spica which won’t be coming up until a little closer to sunrise. Out in this direction, just after Leo, there are a load of galaxies. Taking a slightly closer look, they are little fuzzy shapes, but those are galaxies and there are loads of them. We are looking quite low in the sky , so they are going to be extincted by the atmosphere, and of course this is also looking from the city. However, even from a city sky, they are visible through small telescopes. Even quite a small telescope, like a Meade ETX 80, reveals some of those galaxies from a city sky. Without the light pollution they’d be much clearer of course. Even though Uranus is in our solar system, observing these galaxies is easier because they’re so much bigger, even a much smaller telescope can bring them into view.
Pushing further forward to get the Sun rising, we should catch Venus just coming above the horizon. That gives us Venus, Jupiter, Mars, and the Moon all visible. Uranus is still in the sky over to the west as well, but obscured by the light of the Sun. Mercury is too close to the Sun from our perspective at the moment for us to see it, but we are getting several planets on the morning of Samhain, the 1st of November. Venus is going to be a tricky one to catch, but Jupiter and Mars are nice and easy, Saturn’s up for the majority of the night and it is becoming a good time to look at Uranus, as well as some of those other deep sky objects
Pulling back to 11 o’clock on Halloween, we’re going to lean back at look straight up at the zenith, straight into the middle of the sky. The higher in the sky you’re looking, the less atmosphere there is in the way, giving you a better, clearer view, in this case of the Andromeda Galaxy. We’re seeing it through just one air mass. If we bring it lower in the sky, the amount of air masses will be much higher. We’ll get a better view when it’s higher in the sky, and I think 1.02 air masses is as low as we can get. Let’s take a quick look at this with a telescope. Again, a Meade ETX 80 is enough to show a fuzzy shape and that is with a smaller telescope. A reasonable telescope, about 5 inches aperture or so, that gives a pretty good view of the Andromeda Galaxy. Even binoculars, not even particularly big binoculars, can give a good view of the Andromeda Galaxy.
Halloween is a great night and it is a great night to take a look at several things in the sky. We’ve got a lot of things coming up and the Moon will be past full, so it will be up and bright as we get closer to morning time but for the beginning of the evening, it’ll still be nice and dark. I hope that you all get a chance to see these things on Halloween, I hope you have clear skies and you get a chance to do some astronomy. Even if you don’t, you’ve now gotten a preview here, which I hope you did enjoy. If you did enjoy this piece, then please do like it. If you like this kind of content, then please subscribe to this website and my YouTube channel. Thank you very much for reading and hopefully I’ll see you back here next time.
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