Today we are going to talk about the meteor showers that are coming up in November, but we are also going to talk about comets and we’re going to talk about a comet that isn’t connected with any meteor showers that we know of. As I mentioned in the overview of November from a couple of weeks ago, we have a couple of meteor showers coming up this month.
I mentioned the Andromedids, they’re very minor, we can see that their parent body is Comet 3D/Biela. The D in this case stands for disintegrated, so this comet Biella is no longer around, but the stream of material that it left behind is still there as the Andromedids. The Andromedids are not a particularly productive meteor shower, and there is a good chance that there will be less and less material for us to crash into as this stream of material is no longer being refilled by a comet coming back around. I mentioned the Southern Taurids and the Northern Taurids as well, we’re seeing them in roughly the same position in the sky at a very similar time of year, and they’re both listed by Stellarium as having the comet 2P/Encke as their parent body. As I mentioned previously, the reason why the Northern Taurids are at a slightly different time, radiating from a slightly different location, seems to be that their parent body is actually a cometary fragment, an asteroid in a comet like orbit, that probably broke off from comet 2P/Encke at some time in the past. Those are some of the minor ones, though the Southern Taurids aren’t that minor, they’re an okay meteor shower. The Leonids are just a little bit better, and their parent body comet is 55P/Tempel-Tuttle.
Most of these are “P”s, they are periodical comets, they’re going to come around again and again and it is that ongoing return that refills the stream of material that causes out showers. The Orionids parent body isn’t being listed, but of course the Orionids parent body is Halley’s Comet just like the Eta Aquarids. They are both meteor showers that seem to come from a stream left behind by Halley’s Comet, one on one side of its orbit, one on the other, so we can run into the same stream more than once, it just doesn’t always happen, and I believe it is less common than when we just run into one. These meteor showers, they all came from comets, even if those comets are no longer around, even if it may be a broken or partially broken comet still producing meteors.
There is a new comet, we are going to take a look for a comet that almost certainly isn’t known to Stellarium yet. We are looking for S1 2026, but we’re only getting the 1965 S1 comet. Of course, these designations do repeat year by year, but S1 EUCLID is not there yet. Stellarium may try to access a database if you have a connection set up, mine tries to access the Strasbourg University SIMBAD database, when an unknown object is searched. However, I will be able to do this faster, put this comet into Stellarium, using the Solar System Editor plugin, which is under the Solar System Objects in the viewing panel. We’ll click into the Solar System Editor, we’re going to the Solar System tab and the “Import orbital elements in MPC format” button at the bottom. Then we’ll do an online search, and we’re going to be very careful to spell and type everything exactly correctly because that is what this lookup system needs.
That gives us C/2026 S1 (Euclid), a newly discovered comet discovered by the Euclid space telescope. Euclid is a space telescope, a satellite telescope, orbiting out in space. This comet is interesting not only because it was just discovered, but that it is the first comet this system has ever found, finding comets is not its job, or mission statement. Currently it’s way out at magnitude 20.66. We’re looking in the constellation Draco. Zooming in we get a little bit of fuzziness, but that is all. This comet is unlikely to have a trail in Stellarium, but we’re going to move through time and see how close it gets to the Earth. This comet is pretty far away from us right now, over 8 AU away from us and 8 AU away from the Sun. As we move through time, it continues to get closer and closer to us, we’re moving into next year. It reaches its perihelion to the Sun at 8.736 AU. That is incredibly far away. It’s 1306 million kilometers away, and that’s not happening until next October, the 10th of the 10th 2027.
We’ll zoom out and take a look at this from the solar system observer, a hypothetical observation point way above the solar system, in order to get an idea of where it is moving through our solar system. We will almost certainly need to turn on the orbits of the major planets to act as landmarks for ourselves, simply because this object is quite far out, very small, and quite difficult to see. It is out beyond the orbit of Saturn at its closest approach to the Sun. I’m going to turn on the orbits of the major planets, and for the first time in quite a while, Stellarium is drawing the orbit of this comet.
It looks like the closest it ever gets to the Sun is just about the orbit of Saturn. From above it seems to loop out again after this, reaching a point just inside the orbit of Uranus. There is a good chance that this path is tilted. If we move through a little bit of time, we’re moving back through time, the comet gets further from the Sun, even though it looks like it’s getting closer to the orbit of Saturn from Uranus. That is almost certainly an artifact of the fact that we’re looking down 2D on a projection of a 3D system. The comet is at its closest to the Sun at the peak of the ellipse closest to the Sun, before it loops back around again to head outwards. It’s not going to get its closest to the Sun at one of broad sides of the ellipse, that’s just not how the elliptical shape of orbits work. Even though it looks like it’s getting closer to the Sun and closer to the orbit of Saturn, it can’t be, the orbit must be inclined. This is a newly discovered comet, and it’s exciting because it was the first comet discovered by the Euclid Space Telescope, and the Euclid Space Telescope is taking time lapses of the stars to chart their positions, it just so happened to catch this comet going past. This is a comet that goes way out beyond the orbit of Uranus, from just inside the orbit of Neptune all the way through to just inside the orbit of Uranus. This comet is a very distant one that stays distant from the Sun all of the time, and that means that magnitude 20 it probably going to be the brightest that we get.
We will hop back to the Earth as well as returning a little bit closer to today. We’ll let the Sun set and we’ll turn around to the north to see our Comet Euclid. At least it’s very high in the sky, which means we’re not looking at it through too many air masses. That is the newly discovered comet that is coming up in the near future. We’ll move back towards morning time and a little bit later in the month to get the Leonids back in the sky. We’ll keep moving to get the Alpha Monocerotids, and then all the way through to the end of the month, bringing up the November Orionids. The Geminids and the Alpha Hydrids also pop up, but they aren’t peaking until we get into December. We do want the Moon out of the way as much as possible, so we’ll take a look at the 19th. The 19th is a couple of days after the peak of the Leonids but they’re still contributing a couple of meteor showers. The Alpha Monocerotids have a great degree of variability and are peaking on the 22nd, so we’re pretty close to that peak. We’ll move forward a couple of days to get to the peak. Stellarium is predicting 390 to 500 meteors an hour at maximum, but this is a very variable shower, so there’s a good chance we’ll actually have much less. We’ll take a further look at them when we get a little bit closer to their peak.
The November Orionids are peaking on the 28th, but with a very low contribution, they’re not adding too many at all. However all of these meteor showers, be they minor like the Andromedids, or at least medium like the Leonids, there are several going on over the course of November. If we move back until the Orionids pop back up, we can see that even though the Orionids are past their peak, their range continues into the 7th of November.
There are several meteor showers going on. Only a couple of them are peaking, but a few others are sort of stretching through November, beginning in November and peaking in December or ending in November after peaking in October. There is a good chance that we will have several meteor showers out during this dark time of year with long nights, a particularly good time to see those meteor showers. Every time you see a meteor shower, every time you see a shooting star that comes from one of these showers, really you’re seeing a little bit of material left behind by a comet and we have a brand new comet, the comet C/2026 S1 (Euclid), only newly discovered.
I hope that you get a chance to see some meteors, some shooting stars, over the course of November. If you have a good enough telescope, you can try and look for the comet 2026 S1 (Euclid), but of course, you now know where it is and just how far it is from the Sun. I hope that you’ve enjoyed reading this. If you did, please do like this piece. 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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