The days are getting shorter and the nights longer and colder. There are many highlights in November that will be well worth trying to experience. The sun has also been unusually active so there is a chance of northern lights even in southern Maine if a large enough flare interacts with Earth.

Two meteor showers will happen this month: the Taurids and the Leonids. 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.

Additional Images

This chart represents the sky as it appears over Maine in November. The stars are shown as they appear at 9:30 p.m. EST early in the month, at 8:30 p.m. at midmonth and at 7:30 p.m. at month’s end. No planets are visible at map time. To use the map, hold it vertically and turn it so that the direction you are facing is at the bottom. Sky chart prepared by George Ayers.

The Taurids will peak on Nov. 3 and 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 in most 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 from Nov. 17 to 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 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. There was not a single lull of more than 10 seconds. At one point I saw seven meteors in a single second race out from the constellation of Leo. There were also 10 or 15 brilliant fireballs that lit up the whole sky and all the scenery 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 only time I truly got a sense of Earth’s constant motion around the sun. As a bonus, to top off the memorable night, we saw zodiacal light hovering over the eastern horizon well before dawn. This eerie, glowing cone of ethereal light is caused by sunlight bouncing off trillions of tiny particles of comet and asteroid dust that 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 on Nov. 25. Comet Siding Spring had a close encounter with Mars last month as it passed 80,000 miles above the red planet. Our human-made missions on Mars are safe and some of them got some good pictures of this rare event.

Jupiter continues to rise a little earlier each night and will rise by 10 p.m. standard time by the end of the month. The king of the planets can be seen in eastward motion just to the right of Regulus, the brightest star in Leo, 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 in the month. It can be seen near the star Spica 45 minutes before sunrise low in our east-southeastern sky during the first two weeks of the month.

There were two excellent festivals in October: the fourth annual New England Fall Astronomy Festival at the University of New Hampshire and the sixth annual Acadia Night Sky Festival in Bar Harbor. I attended both and was amazed at how many new things I learned and experienced. There was an impressive array of speakers at each event, all passionately sharing their knowledge and discoveries.

Carolyn Porco, who runs the imaging team with the Cassini mission that has been showing us incredible new things about Saturn and its large collection of moons for the past 10 years, gave the keynote address at UNH. They discovered that the moon Enceladus is constantly spewing huge jets of salty water vapor into space from an ocean deep below its icy surface. This vapor forms the E ring of Saturn. A future mission will analyze the vapor for organic particles – a possible origination of life in our solar system other than Earth.

They also dropped a probe onto Titan, Saturn’s largest moon and the only one with a thick atmosphere. It is the most Earth-like place in the solar system. They discovered a lake of liquid methane near the pole the size of Lake Superior. It is about 300 degrees below zero on Titan and lakes of ethane and methane abound, shrouded in haze.

On July 19, 2013, the Cassini spacecraft took only the third picture of Earth from deep space ever. It is an astounding picture of a brilliant back-lit Saturn with its wonderfully thin rings. Mars and Venus are each just one pixel in this image, and Earth and our tiny moon also show up very clearly. This picture from nearly 1 billion miles away helps us attain a more accurate cosmic perspective and reflect on our place and purpose on our small planet.

The Acadia Night Sky Festival was even more amazing. It culminated in a star party on top of Mt. Cadillac for more than 1,000 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 Earth’s shadow reflected off our atmosphere. I could even see the distinct outline of 1,530-foot Mt. 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 the shadow, the Milky Way dominated the crystal-clear night. Its powerful and all-encompassing arms, composed of more than 300 billion stars, seemed to engulf the puny Earth and its 7 billion travelers in a constant demonstration of pure power and silent beauty.

NOVEMBER HIGHLIGHTS

Nov. 1: Mercury is at its greatest eastern elongation.

Nov. 2: Daylight Savings Time ends at 2 a.m.

Nov. 3: Mercury will be 5 degrees north of Spica.

Nov. 4: The Taurid meteor shower peaks this morning.

Nov. 6: Full moon at 5:23 p.m. This is the Frosty or Beaver Moon.

Nov. 8: Edmund Halley was born on this day in 1656. I first saw his famous comet on this day in 1985.

Nov. 9: Carl Sagan was born on this day in 1934.

Nov. 14: Last quarter moon is at 10:16 a.m.

Nov. 15: William Herschel was born on this day in 1738.

Nov. 16: An interstellar message was broadcast to the globular star cluster in Hercules from the Arecibo radio telescope on this day in 1974.

Nov. 17: The Leonids meteor shower peaks.

Nov. 20: Edwin Hubble was born on this day in 1889.

Nov. 22: New moon is at 7:32 a.m.

Nov. 29: First quarter moon is at 5:06 a.m.

Bernie Reim of Wells is co-director of the Astronomical Society of Northern New England.

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