Today we are going to focus in on some of the conjunctions that we’re having early in November. Really the 2nd or the 3rd is the date of the first good conjunction for us here in Ireland. The Crescent Moon will be next to Mars on the 2nd, and moving forward to the 3rd, it’s moved past Mars and Jupiter, up next to Regulus.
I mentioned in the previous piece, where we looked at an overview of what’s happening in November, that this must be better from some other location on Earth. Between the morning of the 2nd and the morning of the 3rd, the Moon has moved past Mars, past Jupiter, and down next to Regulus, but we miss it because that happens during the day for us here in Ireland. In fact, if we move back in time as much as we can, earlier in the morning of the 3rd, we’ll see the Moon coming closer to Jupiter and they do get very close together just as they’re rising from here in Ireland. Moving back to the 2nd, we can see that the Moon is fairly far from Mars. As we move later in the night, coming up to morning time, the Moon does get closer to Mars, but not close enough from our perspective.
Luckily, a commenter has suggested a location where the conjunction on the 3rd is going to be more visible, somewhere it’s going to look a little bit better, where the Moon and Jupiter are going to be closer together. That is where we are going to go. We are going to 15 degrees north, but of course our latitude isn’t going to matter too much. It’s really our longitude that we’re going to have to change here in order to get a better view. Changing latitude shifts us down significantly closer to the equator, back into daytime even. Being much closer to the equator, the Sun would already be up. We are moving pretty significantly in our longitude, firstly crossing over to the east, and then we are going even further, 87 degrees east. I’ve mentioned before that the minutes and the seconds of latitude and longitude don’t normally matter too much because they are measuring such small values, but I have been provided with them, so I am going to put them into Stellarium and that should bring us to the correct location.
We are just off the coast of India and Bangladesh, we’re just in the Bay of Bengal. We are still looking here at UTC, and I was told to look at 2:58 am, but that doesn’t work for UTC. Of course, the local time would be different. As I mentioned, we’re very close to the equator, so in the east Mars, Jupiter and the Moon rise in almost a straight line above the rising Sun. That should also give us a fairly good view of Venus as well. We’re here just on the 2nd, according to UTC, I was told to look for the 3rd, the time zones here are probably changing the apparent date. The Moon and Jupiter are absolutely right next to each other. We have the Crescent Moon, and Jupiter, and many of Jupiter’s moons. Thanks to the phase, all of the cracks and craters on the lunar surface are visible. If we zoom in here on Jupiter, we should see it get occulted by the Moon, at least partially.
We’re definitely seeing a partial occultation, which as I’ve mentioned in previous pieces, and the commenter who has suggested several of these events has confirmed, the partial occultations can be almost cooler than a total occultation, especially when it comes to planets like Jupiter. We’ll take the moment where part of the planet Jupiter is just behind the part of the Moon that is being affected by the terminator. That reveals all of the cracks and craters, though they’re not very well CGI’d in Stellarium, not up close at least. This would be a much more impressive live through a real telescope. The stripes of Jupiter are visible, as is Europa in front of Jupiter. With a fairly big binoculars, Jupiter and some of Jupiter’s moons are visible as bright dots, so that’s already a fantastic start. We’ll move up to a larger telescope because I do want to see if I can catch any of the texture on the lunar surface. With a 26 millimeter ocular, a Barlow x3 lens and using a Meade LX 200 16inch aperture telescope, so a huge telescope with plenty of help, the stripes on Jupiter, some of Jupiter’s moons, and some of the wonderful detail on our Moon is visible. This would be difficult to achieve, as I’ve said, it’s very large telescope. We’ll come down to something a little bit more realistic, a Meade ETX90. No longer are the stripes on Jupiter visible, but we’re definitely seeing Jupiter and its moons, and that texture on our Moon.
I do need to warn you that the Moon is very bright. That may seem silly, but the Moon is very bright. This isn’t a Full Moon, so you don’t have to worry too much, but looking at a Full Moon with a powerful telescope does focus a lot of light through your telescope and onto your eye. It can at least hurt and in certain circumstances it can be dangerous. You might need a reducer. This is something that reduces the amount of light that your telescope is getting, usually by reducing field of view or magnification. It makes things, technically, a little harder to see, but sometimes that’s very useful. It takes out some of the brightness that can be too much, especially for example, if you’re taking images. There’s a big difference between the view with a reducer, with nothing at all and then with some extra assistance from Barlow lenses. That lets you get a big range of magnification out of one telescope. That is from that location in the Bay of Bengal and I would say for large regions of India and Bangladesh, this is going to look fantastic, so I very much hope that some of you get to see it.
We are going to come back to our default viewing location in Ireland and we’re going to move forward a few days to catch a conjunction that I only briefly mentioned in the last piece. We’re still coming up to morning time and we’re going to move ahead later in the month, to the 7th. I did mention in the previous piece that Venus was very close to the bright star Spica, and as we moved through the month, the Moon come very close to Venus and Spica. This is another conjunction, but a tougher one to catch. The Moon is a very narrow crescent and we have to look at this early in the morning because that’s when it’s happening. The earlier you catch it, the closer to the horizon you catch it, the better. I’ve given out on this channel before about our atmosphere as it tends to get in the way. Of course, it does allow us to breathe and survive, so I will forgive it for making it more difficult to see things, but they do look a little bit better without the atmosphere.
The atmosphere is going to reduce them or extinct them, which means they’re not going to appear as bright. Venus should be magnitude -4.5, but close to the horizon, we’re only seeing it at magnitude -2. This is still incredibly bright, it’s much brighter than Spica ever gets. Spica is normally magnitude 0.97, but is reduced to 3, which is also still fairly bright. As long as you don’t have any buildings in your way low to the east, you should have a good view. As we move further through morning time they do get closer together. For people who are further in the west, you should actually see this happening even better. We’ll get rid of the atmosphere to at least get an idea of what it would look like, and the Moon does come even closer to being in a line with Venus and Spica. This is very similar to that conjunction that we’re going to see on the 3rd. We’re seeing it happening fairly close, but for other locations they would be able to see it happening really a little bit better. There is the last conjunction, the one that we are going to get at the end of the month when the Moon has come the whole way back around. Even on the 7th, Jupiter and Mars are really high in the sky while the sky is still fairly dark. Moving through the month, the Moon comes back around right next to Jupiter on the 30th.
We will zoom in and take a quick closer look. We will also move through the night while looking at this conjunction just to see the variance, to see how close these two things get together. The Moon and Jupiter do get very close together. Moving back towards moonrise, sunset, they’re getting further apart. As we move closer to morning time they do get closer together and indeed they get fairly close, but by 7 o’clock in the morning, the Sun is just starting to rise. Really I can only suggest observing this with the naked eye. Using a telescope with this much light in the sky isn’t that safe, but again, we’ll remove the atmosphere and in this case we will also remove the ground to see how much closer the Moon gets to Jupiter. The Moon drifts past Jupiter, very close together but with no occultation. Then it moves a little further from Mars, but still moving past Mars, and inbetween it is very close to Regulus as well. As the Moon is so close to us compared to these distant objects, we should be able to exploit parallax to see these things in a slightly different way, but we’ve already checked that out for one of the other conjunctions, so we will leave this, happening right at the end of the month, we will leave checking out that view from different locations for another time,
Hopefully you get to see these conjunctions, these close conjunctions of the planets and the Moon, even if you don’t get to see them as perfectly as some people in India and Bangladesh are going to see the November 3rd conjunction of Jupiter and the Moon. Regardless, I hope you at least get to see these planets, even if you don’t see them close together or passing by the Moon or doing anything particularly strange, I do hope you at least get to see them in the sky. I hope that you enjoyed reading this, if you did 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 watching and hopefully I’ll see you back here next time.
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