This column was provided by San Benito County resident and amateur astronomer David Baumgartner as part of a local series on astronomy. Lea este articulo en español aqui.
No Telescope is needed for this view.
It is often I hear people say: “I can’t go out and watch the skies at night, I have no idea where or what to look for, besides I don’t even have a telescope”
Well, this month I’m going to show you how you can go out into your back yard, not your neighbors, that might cause a problem, put down a blanket or use a lawn chair, lay on your back, without a telescope or even a pair of binoculars, and look straight up, and be entertained for hours. It would help if you had constellation map of the night sky.
First off, pick a night when the stars seem to jump out at you. Hopefully your backyard is somewhat free of glary lights nearby, which is getting harder to find these days, and is a whole other story If the night chill gets a little to cool for you, wrap that blanket around you. Nothing is worse than freezing your “you know what off” when you are trying to have fun at something. If your dog is anything like our dog, Ally, you may want to leave him/her in the house. There is no way Ally will leave us alone when we are laying on the ground. To her, that means time for play.
O.K., we are finally on our backs, the dog is in the house, and you are looking straight up into the night sky. What are we looking for? The first thing you may notice is that the sky isn’t as clear as you may have thought. It looks like, from the coast, our normal Summer San Benito Co. evening clouds may be coming in to obstruct your view. But look closely; it’s the Milky Way. The Milky Way is always there waiting for you to admire it. It is one of the most beautiful things you will ever see, as long as you understand what it is. This cloud is really billions of stars, so far away that they look like clouds. Some of these stars are thousands of light years away from us.
In any November, while looking straight up, there is a star that doesn’t get lost in the Milky way. You can pick out the 5th brightest star in the whole sky, Vega, some 25 light years away. So the light you see left that area of Vega some twenty-five years ago traveling at the speed of 186,000 miles a second. No pit stops, no layovers, just barreling straight through to your eye. Feel special? Well, you should. So what were you doing 25 years ago when the light left Vega? Ponder on that for a while.
And while you are looking in that area, you might as well try and find the Summer Triangle. Start with Vega, in the constellation Lyra, which is a small parallelogram of stars. Draw an imaginary line from Vega through Lyra that points the way to Altair, the 11th brightest star in the heavens, part of an even larger parallelogram that defines the constellation Aquila the Eagle. Altair is easily recognizable because it is the centerpiece of a row of three bright stars. If you follow the Milky Way northward from Aquila, you’ll arrive at the third Summer Triangle star, Deneb, the 19th brightest star in the heavens, located in the constellation Cygnus the Swan. Altair and Vega are stars a bit larger than the sun and only 16 and 25 light-years away. But Deneb is about 1600 light-years away. It is actually one of the biggest and brightest stars known. So what were you doing 1600 years ago when the light left Deneb? Don’t ponder on that too much, it could cause you problems. Just look what it has done to me….
Now if your night out happens to be around the 17th of the month you will notice an event that will keep your eyes tuned to the whole sky. And that would be what is called “The Leonid Showers”, better known as the Leonid Meteor showers. These showers won’t put on quite the show for us this year as usual because of the Full Moon will interfere with them this go-round. But on a clear night we should expect about ten or so meteors an hour.
Meteors range in size from grains of sand to vary small pebbles and have the consistency of ash. At the speed of around 40 miles an hour they ram into our atmosphere creating an incandescent trail as they vaporize.
The vary best time to witness these trails would be early in the morning 3am to justbefore dawn. But if you can’t get yourself to stay up that late, or I should say that early, you will still have a good chance to enjoy a good number of meteors.
November will be a good time to check out a number of planets. On the 16th Mercury will be at its best for the month and set an hour after sunset. Venus stays up two hours after sunset and is easy to pick out in the western sky. Saturn will be up all night for you to enjoy. Jupiter rises at sunset on the 30th and spends the rest of the night up for viewing. . This is one you won’t want to miss, being the best the gas giant has been in about a decade. The beginning of the month Mars rises around 11:30pm and by the end of the month rises at 8:30pm. Mars continues to get bigger and brighter until the first of the year when it gets the closest to Earth. This you don’t want to miss. Uranus and Neptune hang around the western sky for the rest of the month, a little harder to locate.
O.K., there you are. No telescope needed, just your own eyes and a blanket. So you have no excuse now not to enjoy a little searching of the skies and witnessing some natural fireworks. The only thing that can stop you now is bad weather. The main thing is to enjoy the outing, whether you are with others or just by yourself.
Clear skies.
WHAT’S UP THIS MONTH – Nov 2024
1 New Moon
3 Moon passes 2° south of Mercury
3 Moon passes 0.08° south of Antares
4 Moon passes 3° south of Venus
9 First Quarter Moon
9 Mercury passes 2° north of Antares
10 Moon passes 0.09° north of Saturn
11 Moon passes 0.6° north of Neptune
14 Moon is at perigee (223,762 miles from Earth)
15 Full Moon
15 Moon passes 4° north of Uranus
17 Leonid meteor shower peaks
17 Moon passes 6° north of Jupiter
20 Moon passes 2° north of Mars
22 Las Quarter Moon
26 Moon is t apogee (251,850 miles from Earth)
27 Mon passes 0.4° north of Spica
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