Special Events and The Sky This Month

 Brightest Satellites
          This page tracks the 100 brightest satellites and gives their NASA two line elements (TLE).

Iridium Satellites
Iridium bills itself as the worlds first handheld global satellite telephone and paging network. The satellites that were put into orbit for this network can be tracked using the TLEs found on this page. More Iridium info.

Other Satellites
A good collection of weather, navigation, military, and communications satellite elements from the Celestrack website.

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   November Skies

Highlights: Comet Journal, Martian Landers, Planet Plotting, Meteors, Depths of Space, November Moon

Focus Constellations: Pegasus, Andromeda, Perseus, Cassiopeia, Cepheus, Cygnus, Draco, Ursa Major, Ursa Minor, Camelopardalis

Comet Journal:  

Comet C/2006 W3 (Christensen) has descended into evening twilight in the southern sky and dropped to 9th magnitude.

C/2007 Q3 (Siding Spring) has remained at 9th magnitude after passing perihelion on October 7th. It rises between Leo and Virgo in the eastern sky at 3AM EST and can be more easily viewed as it moves into Coma Berenices. It will pass by numerous galaxies in the latter half of November as it moves in front of the Virgo-Coma galaxy cluster.

Comet 88P/Howell (2009) moves eastward in November through Sagittarius which sets at 7:30PM making observation of the 9th magnitude comet extremely difficult. It passed perihelion on Oct. 16th and is slightly outside the orbit of Mars pacing Earth's motion through space so it will to move slowly through the early sunset sky as it pulls away from Earth in the first half of 2010.

Martian Landers:

Fourteen sols of driving by Sol 2028 (October 7, 2009) produced 245.24 meters of progress for Opportunity. The rover is on the westward leg of a circuit that will avoid a large area of sand with unusually large ripples blocking the southward route to Endeavour Crater. From Sol 2028 to Sol 2042 the rover completed another 359.59 meters and examined two more pitted meteorites (Shelter Island and Mackinac) with diameters of about 0.5 meters.

Spirit became embedded in soft soil at a site called “Troy” five months ago, more than five years into a mission on Mars that was originally scheduled to last for three months. The rover team suspended further driving attempts with Spirit while evaluating possibilities from tests performed at JPL simulating the Troy situation.

After completion of the readiness tests and analysis of results by the rover team, an independent panel is now examining the driving plans developed by the rover team as a result of the experiments conducted in the last five months. Unless that review recommends any further preparations, Spirit will probably begin extrication moves within two weeks after the review.

Spirit has spent much of its time at Troy actively examining its surroundings, including analysis of layered soil at the site. In September, a new issue began affecting operations. Data from Spirit indicated that a brake on the motor that rotates the rover’s dish-shaped high-gain antenna was not working correctly. The team has been getting more diagnostic data and developing a work-around strategy similar to work-arounds already used for rover-motor brakes that showed similar symptoms earlier.

Meteors:

The Leonid Meteor shower is active Nov. 10 - 23 and peaks on the 16th and 17th. Following perihelion passage of Comet 55P/Temple-Tuttle in 1998, the mid-November transits of Earth through the stream of debris left by by the comet produced storms of over 1000 meteors per hour with spikes up to 3000 per hour in 1999, 2001 and 2002. In recent years hourly counts have been on the order of one to two dozen but over 100 per hour were observed last year. The 2009 Leonid shower is unlikely to produce a storm but may exceed 100 and approach 500 meteors per hour in dark sky locations. New Moon on the 16th ensures that interference by lunar glare will be minimal.

Depth of Space:

The dim constellations of the southern skies of November were thought by the Greeks to comprise the domain of Oceanus, god of the ocean. They make up the "watery" region of the sky with two fish, a dolphin, a whale, the water carrier, a river, a fish-tailed goat, and the southern fish.

The southern galactic pole in Sculptor immediately south of Cetus, the whale, centers this region characterized by a dearth of bright stars and prominent constellations. Instead of viewing the nearby bright young stars and nebulae in the open star clusters making up the galactic disk, observers face into the depths of intergalactic space beyond the southern margin of the Milky Way Galaxy. Stars within the Milky Way Galaxy in this direction are for the most part limited to residents of dim, distant globular clusters which may be intrinsically bright but are so far away that large diameter telescopes are required for viewing.

The Milky Way is on the southern margin of the local cluster of galaxies, so the only other member that is visible in this direction is Barnard's Galaxy at over 100,000 parsecs. The nearest cluster of galaxies in the "watery region" of the sky is the Sculptor Group at 2-3 megaparsecs.

November Moon:

November's Full Moon is at 2:14PM EDT on the 4th. It is the "Hunter's Moon" or "Frosty Moon". It was called the "Beaver Moon" in colonial America, "Snow Moon" in medieval England, and "Dark Moon" by the Celts. The Chinese named it "White Moon" and the Anishnaabe (Chippewa and Ojibwe) call it "Gashkadino-giizis(oog)" (Freezing Moon). The length of this lunation is 28.66 days.

Planet....Constellation...Magnitude..Moon Passage...Moon Phase/Age
Sun........Libra/Scorpius..-26.8......2:14PM EST. 11/16..
........................................................................New ~ 0 days
Mercury.Libra/Scorpius....-0.8.......2.8°S, 5AM EST, 11/17
.....................................................Waxing Crescent ~ 0.8 days
Venus....Virgo/Libra.......-3.9.........6.1°SSW, 11AM EST, 11/15
...................................................Waning Crescent ~ 27.5 days
Mars......Cancer..............+0.3.........3.0°S, 1AM EST, 11/9
....................................................Waning Gibbous ~ 21.1 days
Jupiter...Capricornus.......-2.3.........4.0°N, 5PM EST, 11/23
....................................................Waxing Crescent ~ 7.30 days
Saturn....Virgo................+1.1.........8.0°S, 8PM EST, 11/12
....................................................Waning Crescent ~ 24.9 days
Uranus.. Aquarius...........+5.8.........6°N, 1PM EST, 11/26
....................................................Waxing Gibbous ~ 10.1 days Neptune.Capricornus......+7.9.........3.0°N, 1AM EST, 11/24
....................................................Waxing Crescent ~ 7.63 days

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