The days are getting shorter now, even as the nights are getting longer and colder. There are many interesting highlights this month that will be well worth the experience. The sun has also been unusually active, so there is a good chance of northern lights even in southern Maine, if a large enough flare interacts with the Earth.
Two meteor showers will happen this month: the Taurids on the 4th and the Leonids on the 17th. The Taurids, caused by Comet Encke, are the slowest of all meteors at only 18 miles per second, or about the same speed that we orbit the sun, and the Leonids are the fastest, at more than twice the speed, at 44 miles per second.
The Taurids will peak on Nov. 3-4, but they can last from the end of October through the first week of November. They only produce about a dozen meteors per hour, but they produce many fireballs because the little chunks of Comet Encke are larger than the smaller pieces of comet dust that we usually encounter during these showers. So look to the east in the night sky this Halloween, and you may be lucky enough to witness a brilliant fireball.
The Leonids, caused by Comet Tempel-Tuttle, will peak Nov. 17-18. They are not very prolific now at only about 20 per hour, but they were simply astounding for several years at the turn of the century when their parent comet passed near the Earth. I will never forget the night of Nov. 18, 2001. I was extremely privileged to see nearly 1,000 meteors per hour for nearly three hours that amazing morning, right up until dawn and nearly to sunrise. That averaged one meteor every 4 seconds. There was not a single lull that whole night of more than 10 seconds. At one point, I saw seven meteors in a single second race out from the constellation of Leo the lion. There were also 10 or 15 brilliant fireballs that lit up the whole night sky and all the scenery on the ground at our observatory that we had just built in Kennebunk. Their dust trails lasted for many minutes, slowly twisting high in the atmosphere as new meteor trails streaked through the lingering dust. That was the first and only time that I truly got a sense of the Earth’s constant motion around the sun, which is 67,000 mph.
As a bonus to top off that memorable night, we even saw the eerie, glowing cone of ethereal light hovering over the eastern horizon well before dawn, which is the zodiacal light. That is caused by sunlight bouncing off trillions of tiny particles of comet and asteroid dust that completely encircle us in the ecliptic plane of our solar system.
Mars is still visible in the evening sky until two hours after sunset. Our neighboring planet is moving east at about the same rate that we are moving around the sun, so it seems to stay in the same place relative to our sunset. The red planet will move through Sagittarius this month and it moved through Scorpius last month. Watch a waxing crescent moon pass near Mars Nov. 25. Comet Siding Spring had a very close encounter with Mars last month, as it passed just 80,000 miles above the red planet. All five of our human-made missions on Mars are safe, and some of them got great pictures of this rare event.
Jupiter continues to rise a little earlier each night, and it will rise by 10 p.m. standard time by the end of this month. The king of the planets can be seen in direct eastward motion just to the right of Regulus, the brightest star in Leo the lion, about one hour before sunrise. Watch a last quarter moon pass close to Jupiter on Nov. 14.
Mercury will make its best dawn apparition of the year early this month. Our first planet can be seen near the star Spica, 45 minutes before sunrise low in our east-southeastern sky during the first two weeks this month.
The 4th annual New England Fall Astronomy Festival in Durham, New Hampshire was held recently, and I was amazed at how many new things I learned about astronomy. There was an impressive array of speakers, all passionately sharing their knowledge and discoveries.
Carolyn Porco, who runs the imaging team with the Cassini mission, which has been showing us incredible new things about Saturn and its large collection of unique moons for the past 10 years, gave the keynote address. They discovered that the moon Enceladus is constantly spewing huge jets of salty water vapor from an ocean deep below its icy surface into space. This vapor forms the E ring of Saturn. A future mission will analyze this vapor for organic particles and another possible origination of life in our solar system other than Earth.
They also dropped a probe onto Titan ”“ the largest moon of Saturn at 3,000 miles in diameter. It is the most Earth-like place in the solar system and the only moon with a thick atmosphere. They discovered a lake of liquid methane near the pole of Titan that is the size of Lake Superior. It is about 300 degrees below zero on this incredible moon, and lakes of ethane and methane abound, shrouded in a constant, cold haze.
In July 2013, the Cassini spacecraft took only the third picture of Earth from deep space ever taken by humans. It is a simply astounding picture of a brilliant back-lit image of Saturn with its wonderfully thin rings. Mars and Venus are each just one pixel in this image, and the Earth and our tiny moon also show up very clearly. This picture, from nearly a billion miles away, helps us to truly attain a more accurate cosmic perspective and reflect on our place and purpose on our small planet.
The 6th annual Acadia Night Sky Festival in Bar Harbor was even more amazing. It culminated with a star party on top of Mount Cadillac for more than a thousand people looking through 72 telescopes. I got to the top early, watching the sun set into the western mountains on this perfect and warm autumn evening. Looking east across the ocean, I could see the shadow of Earth reflected back to us off our atmosphere. I could even see the distinct outline of 1,530-foot-high Mount Cadillac as part of this shadow. Then, I watched the waxing crescent moon slowly set along with Saturn, soon to be followed by orange Mars and Antares. As Earth spun deeper into our shadow, the Milky Way finally and fully dominated the crystal clear night. Its powerful and all-encompassing arms ”“ composed of more than 300 billion stars ”“ seemed to completely engulf the puny Earth and its 7 billion travelers in a constant demonstration of pure power and silent beauty.
— Bernie Reim is an amateur astronomer and teaches astronomy lab courses at the University of Southern Maine.
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