Today we are looking ahead to the coming month of November. We’re starting on the 1st of November as there is plenty coming up this, with several interesting things will be happening early in the month as well.
Taking a look at the sky just after sunset, there is still a little bit of a glow in the west at 6:30. This is of course incredibly early, here in Ireland we are far enough north to have darkness much earlier in the evening. Of course for many locations you will have to wait until later, and by the time true darkness kicks in for us here in Ireland, at about 7 o’clock, the stars will at least be emerging for many areas in the northern hemisphere. Even early in the month, the Summer Triangle is already over towards the west and the Square of Pegasus, along with Saturn, is already nice and high in the south east.
We’re going to push ahead towards morning, time to catch a couple more of the planets. Already on the 1st of November we have Jupiter, Mars and the Moon all in a row. If we push forward a little closer to sunrise, we should also just about catch Venus, even though Venus will still be quite close to the Sun this early in November. Jupiter, Mars, and the Moon are getting really high in the sky before the glow of the Sun starts to come in. We can get as late as 6:10 in the morning by the time a noticeable glow of sunrise starts to intervene, just as Venus is coming up. Even from a city sky, Mars is still visible while Venus is out. Those three planets, and the Moon, and the bright star Regulus, are all pretty much in a row because that is pretty much the path of the ecliptic. If we move forward, the Moon jumps ahead, getting very close to Regulus on the morning of the 3rd. It then continues to progress through its phases until it becomes new.
Looking low in the east to Venus, it is very close to Spica, just bright enough to be visible next to Venus. Mercury is starting to come up in the east, but we won’t get a clear view of that until much later in the month. We can keep pushing forward day by day without worrying about the sky brightening, because we are now moving back towards wintertime. By the time we’re into November, we are already closer to the winter solstice than the autumn equinox, we passed that mark on Halloween. On the 18th Mars and Jupiter are right next to each other, right next to the star Regulus. Venus is after coming much higher in the sky, and Mercury is more visible as well. This is going to be a great time to catch all of these planets, as Uranus should still be up. In a city sky at dawn, with that level of brightness, it is going to be tough to see, so we’ll to push back a little bit earlier in the morning.
If you want to observe all of these planets, I suggest moving from west to east, starting with Uranus while it’s still fairly high and fairly dark, then moving on to Mars and Jupiter, then Venus, and by then, Mercury will be after rising, it will be a little easier to see. We will zoom in on Uranus in the west, just between the Hyades and the Pleiades. We are coming up to Uranus’s opposition just a little bit later in November, the best time of the year to see Uranus, when it is at its brightest and up for the entire night. You may remember from a recent piece that even with quite a good telescope, it is tough to see any detail when we look at Uranus, but it’s right there in between the Pleiades and the Hyades in Taurus.
Moving back over to the eastern part of the sky, we will take a closer look at Jupiter, Mars, and Regulus on the 18th. As we zoom in, a couple of Jupiter’s moons are resolved while Mars is still in view. That would take a very big field of view, it would be difficult to achieve. We’ll zoom in just on Jupiter to see all four of the Galilean moons on the 18th, and then we will zoom in on Mars to see if the ice cap is after changing. We’ve been zooming in on Mars every now and again for the past couple of months and Mars has been going through its seasonal changes just like us, but slower. I do think that northern ice cap has shrank just a little bit since the last time we looked at it about a month ago, as Mars continues to move into its northern summer.
Those planets are all up, and Jupiter, Mars, Regulus, and the Moon in particular make some interesting close passes with each other. Mars is very close to Jupiter over a couple of days, but moving down to be very close to Regulus. If we come back a little bit earlier in the month, we’ll see the Moon come back, with the crescent Moon right next to Regulus in the sky on the 3rd. Moving back to the 2nd, it’s on the opposite side of Mars and Jupiter from Regulus. Over the course of that 24 hour period between the 2nd and 3rd of November, somewhere on Earth, the Moon is going to get very close to Mars and Jupiter, but that is something we will take a look at in a future piece.
Now that we have come back a little bit closer to the beginning of the month, we’ll come back a little bit closer to the middle of the night, to 4 o’clock in the morning. We do need to look at the sky quite early because we are looking for the Leonid meteor shower and the Taurid meteor showers. The Taurids will peak first, and moving later in the month the Leonids will as well. The Orionids are still trailing off in early November, but of course they peaked back in October, so they’re not going to be really present for most of the month. On the 4th, with the Moon still in the sky, there are two Taurid radiants, the Northern Taurids and the Southern Taurids. Their radiants are really close to the Pleiades, fairly close to the antihelion point, and we know that the antihelion point is pretty much straight behind us, so these are going to be up for pretty much the entire night.
We’ll click on the Northern Taurids first, they’re peaking on the 12th of November. The Southern Taurids are peaking on the 5th. The Taurids aren’t a particularly big shower, they max out at about five to ten and at midnight here in Ireland, or really about 1 o’clock in the morning, we’re seeing between four and seven. Or, we would be seeing between four and seven if the Taurids were actually at the zenith. Given that they’re a little bit lower in the sky than that, we’re only seeing about one to three an hour from the city, that would certainly go up to about four or five in the countryside. The Southern Taurids, their parent body is the comet 2P/Encke. The Northern Taurids, in Stellarium their parent body is being listed as the same comet, but it actually seems like their parent body is slightly different. It is a slightly separate stream of material, which causes them to peak on a separate date. The real parent of the Northern Taurids may actually be an asteroid that broke off of Comet Encke. That’s why we need to move all the way forward to the 12th for the Northern Taurids to peak, up to their maximum of five, we would be getting four if they were high enough, we’re actually seeing about two in the city, that would certainly get up to three or four in the countryside. Those are the Taurids. The Andromedids are also peaking on the 5th of November, but they are also fairly minor, peaking at about 5 meteors an hour. Early in the month we do have those showers.
The Leonids later in the month are usually better, so we’re moving forward to the 17th. The November Orionids also pop up later in the month, but they’re fairly small as well. The 17th is the technical date of the peak, but on the 18th, at 3 o’clock in the morning, we’re getting 4 to 17 out of 5 to 20. Really we’re only getting 1 to 5 because they’re not particularly high in the sky, and we’re dealing with light pollution. The Leonids can produce much, much more than this. Roughly every 33 years, the Leonids has an outburst, a cyclic peak. The Leonids last peaked about 2001, so we’re probably not going to get another flare up until 2034. Even then, the Leonids are producing more than the Southern or the Northern Taurids, but we’ll probably see less, because they’re not going to be as high in the sky. The Leonids are not going to reach their highest until really close to morning time when the light of the Sun is coming into the sky. They are peaking around the date that we get Mars and Jupiter close together. That date, the morning of the 18th, is a great time to check out all of those planets in a row.
Speaking of the planets, moving forward to the 20th should bring us up to Mercury’s greatest eastern elongation. However, as we’ve seen in the past, Mercury reaching its greatest elongation can actually put it closer to the Sun in our sky, thanks to the angle at which we’re seeing Mercury. Mercury is just moving back around the Sun at the moment, so we’re seeing more of its illuminated face. As it continues to get further away from us, it appears to get brighter. Moving back in time, it’s closer to us, but it’s fainter. Passing the greatest elongation it’s getting further away from us, even though it’s getting brighter. By the 25th, we’ve looped around to the night of the Full Moon.
The Full Moon is with us all night long, and we’re also very close to the date of Uranus’s opposition, which is the 25th. We’ll see if the Moon is 100% full, it’s not, just 99.6% but changing the date only brings that lower. For us, really, the 24th is the night that the Full Moon will rise, and we can see that it is bigger, 99.8% full, as it’s closer to rising. We’re seeing the Full Moon rise very close to full, and it’s a supermoon. It is just 358,000 kilometers away, much closer than the potential maximum of about 400,000 kilometers away. The Moon is at its closest to us and full, and because it is up all night long, it is inevitably very close to Uranus int he sky. The night of Uranus’s peak opposition is the night of the Full Moon, and they’re right next to each other. When a planet is at opposition, it stays with us all night long and reaches its highest peak in the south at midnight, just like the Full Moon. So if a planet is at opposition on the night of the full Moon, they will invariably be close together. Thankfully, Uranus moves around the Sun very slowly, so it’s only going to change its apparent position in the sky at a given time based on our movement around the Sun. A few nights either side of the actual peak opposition, Uranus will still be very high and it will still be quite bright, we’re seeing its magnitude at 5.6.
We’ll come back to the 30th of November to see the Moon, Jupiter and Mars back together again, but now with Mars on the opposite side of Regulus to Jupiter. We’ll zoom in just a little bit to watch this happen, we’re seeing this at just about half past midnight. At the beginning of the month, the 3rd of November, we’ve got the Moon, Regulus, Jupiter and Mars all in a row. As we move through the month, Mars is clearly moving around the Sun much faster than Jupiter, as it appears to fall back towards to sunrise, sliding past Regulus on the way. Then the Moon comes back again at the end of the month.
We are going to take a look at some of those conjunctions from other locations in a future piece, we will also talk more about the meteor showers and the newly discovered Comet 2026 S1 Euclid. Hopefully you’ve enjoyed this piece and you get a chance to see some of these astronomical events in November. If you did like this piece, then please do like it and if you enjoy this content, if you would like to see more information on what’s happening in November, then make sure to 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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