<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0November will be an interesting month to watch the planets dance across the sky, especially <\/span>Jupiter <\/b>and <\/span>Venus.\u00a0 <\/b>On November 4, Jupiter will rise in the east just before Venus sets in the west.\u00a0 Both will be bright (magnitude -2.8 and -3.9 respectively) so they won\u2019t be hard to see even though they will be close to the opposite horizons.\u00a0 By Nov 16, they will have risen to 5 degrees above the east and west horizons within 1.9 hours of sunset.\u00a0 On that same date, there will be a lineup of six solar system bodies (starting from west to east with Venus):\u00a0 <\/span>Venus – Saturn – Neptune – Uranus – Moon – Jupiter <\/b>with the whole line up spanning 162 degrees of the sky.\u00a0 On Nov 30, the Jupiter to Venus array will be 144 degrees across with the pair now being 12 degrees above opposite\u00a0 horizons.\u00a0 This J-V distance will continue to close to 120 degrees (Dec 19) to 90 degrees (Jan 14, 2025) and finally to their closest distance of 61.7 degrees (Feb 27, 2025).\u00a0 After this, Venus will turn back and cross into the morning sky in March.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>Mercury<\/b> will remain a challenge to see in the western sky early in the month.\u00a0 It is hugging the western horizon 35 minutes after sunset just to the right of <\/span>The Eye of the Scorpion, <\/b>the reddish star <\/span>Antares.\u00a0 <\/b>Look for Mercury to fade from view by the last week of the month.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>Saturn <\/b>seems to be fainter than usual due to the near on edge view we are seeing of its Rings.<\/span><\/p>\n With a current tilt of only about 5 degrees to edge on, they are not adding much to our view.\u00a0 When they are at a higher angle of tilt, they add to the planet\u2019s visibility.\u00a0 Early telescope views recorded the Rings as \u2018ears\u2019 until resolution was good enough to see the gap between the Rings and the Planet.\u00a0 The complete edge on view of Saturn will take place from March to early May of 2025<\/span>.<\/b><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Mars<\/b> experiences it’s spring <\/span>Equinox<\/b> on Nov 12.\u00a0 According to Abram\u2019s <\/span>Sky Calendar, <\/span><\/i>\u201cThe northern polar region appears very bright and large, as the North Polar Hood (cloud cover) breaks up and reveals the North Polar Cap of frozen CO2 and water underneath.\u00a0 In addition, look for Mars\u2019 dark surface feature, <\/span>Syrtis Major<\/b> near the center of Mars\u2019 disk about 38-39 minutes later each day beginning on Nov 9 at 12:25 am EST.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The month begins a new Lunar Cycle with a <\/span>New Moon <\/b>on Nov 1.\u00a0 The <\/span>First Quarter <\/b>will take place on Nov 8, the <\/span>Full Moon<\/b> on Nov 15 and the <\/span>Third Quarter <\/b>on Nov 22.\u00a0 Those sky watchers in the PST zone will actually see a second <\/span>New Moon<\/b> in November (on Nov 30) while those of us in the EST zone will mark the new cycle in the early morning hours of Dec 1.\u00a0 The Moon will be doing a little dance of its own with other celestial objects between Nov 3 and Nov 17. \u00a0 On Nov 3, the very young <\/span>Crescent Moon<\/b> near the western horizon will be just below Antares and then move to just below Venus on Nov 4.\u00a0 The rest of this period will show the Moon passing Venus, Saturn, <\/span>The Pleiades, Aldebaran <\/b>and Jupiter.\u00a0 Some stars of The Pleiades will be occulted by the Moon overnight on Nov 15-16.\u00a0 On Nov 27m\u00a0 <\/span>Spica <\/b>\u00a0will be covered by the Moon\u2019s bright edge at 5:30 a.m. EST and the Moon\u2019s earthlight side will uncover the star at 6:40 a.m. EST.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Our historical astronomical event involves the space probe <\/span>Pioneer 10.\u00a0 <\/b>Although it was launched on March 2, 1972, we marked the 50th anniversary of the spacecraft with its November 6, 1973 to January 2, 1974 close approach to Jupiter.\u00a0 The photos sent back to Earth far surpassed any telescopic view taken previous to this close flyby. \u00a0 Pioneer 10 garnered many other bragging rights on this flight:\u00a0 It was the first human-made object to traverse the <\/span>Asteroid Belt<\/b>, and the first to pass Neptune.\u00a0 It returned valuable radiation data from Jupiter and showed that the Gas Giant actually radiates more heat than could be accounted for by the amount of sunlight it collects.\u00a0 Pioneer 10 discovered the ionosphere of the Jovian moon Io and determined the densities of the four Galilean Moons.\u00a0 Upon completion of its initial mission, it went on to study solar winds and cosmic rays.\u00a0 As of November of 2023, Pioneer 10 was some 12 billion miles (or 134 astronomical units) from the Earth heading in the general direction of Aldebaran in the constellation of Taurus, the Bull which is about 68 light-years away – a trip of some 2 million years for the little \u2018satellite that could\u2019.<\/span><\/p>\n Compiled by Ken Raisanen of WOAS-FM – information provided by <\/span>Abrams Planetarium Sky Calendar<\/span><\/i>, Michigan State University.\u00a0 More information and subscription information can be found on their website at <\/span>http:\/\/abramsplanetarium.org\/<\/span><\/a>skycalendar\/ or on X (formerly Twitter) at <\/span>http:\/\/twitter.com\/AbramsSkyNotes<\/span><\/a>.\u00a0 Yearly subscriptions cost $12 and can be started anytime.<\/span><\/p>\n Top Piece Video:\u00a0 Earth, Wind and Fire live on Midnight Special – Shining Star<\/em>, of course<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0November will be an interesting month to watch the planets dance across the sky, especially Jupiter and Venus.\u00a0 On November 4, Jupiter will rise in the east just before Venus sets in the west.\u00a0 Both will be bright (magnitude -2.8 and -3.9 respectively) so they won\u2019t be hard to see even though they will […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,8,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3322","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-from-the-vaults","category-woas"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3322","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3322"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3322\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3325,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3322\/revisions\/3325"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3322"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3322"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3322"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}