Shooting Stars of November

Everybody likes a good display of shooting stars. They don’t require a telescope to observe, and anybody with good eyesight and a dark sky can relax outdoors, casually skywatching for comet remnants to blaze across the sky.

November presents two opportunities for meteor watching. The first meteor shower of the month is the Taurids. In fact, it is actually two showers, the North and South Taurids, which appear during a week’s time from the 5th though the 12th. While the rate is only about five meteors per hour over this time-frame, the Moon will not severely interfere since it will be between New and First Quarter.

The Taurids radiate out of the sky in the constellation Taurus the Bull (visible soon after sunset in the eastern sky), not too far from the well known and easily visible Pleiades star cluster.

These fragments of Encke’s Comet enter our atmosphere at approximately 17 miles per second. They are usually slow (yes, that speed is considered slow for a meteor entry) and yellow, and often explode as fireballs and then fragment into multiple meteors.

The second meteor shower of November peaks on the morning of the 17th. Many of you reading this column are quite familiar with the Leonids. Do you remember the Leonid meteor storm of 2001? Let’s take a quick trip down memory lane. Here’s part of my observing report from nine years ago:

For a couple of hours after midnight we were experiencing about 200 meteors per hour. Between 2:45 am and 3:45 am I personally counted 120. Oh well, you can’t cover the entire sky! Then just after 4:00 am the rate started to increase and soon, between 4:30 and 5:30 am, the rate fluctuated between 600 and 800 per hour.

In one instance I saw 5 or 6 meteors radiate simultaneously from the radiate point in Leo. When I did a 360 degree look around, I often saw 3 or 4 meteors in the sky at once. Most left persistent trains of dust. There were quite a few fireballs as well. One in Orion left a dust train that lasted 5 to 6 minutes.

I wish I could say the Leonids would be even one-tenth that good this year, but a storm level Leonid display is still a couple of decades in the future. I simply wanted you to think back to that beautiful morning and reminisce about the wonderful event that it was and to encourage you to spend a couple of hours to view the display this year.

While the shower is at its best between midnight and dawn, a waxing gibbous Moon (between First Quarter and Full), won’t set until around 3:00 am. That leaves only a couple of hours of dark sky before dawn’s early light to observe about 20 bright, blue or green meteors per hour hitting our atmosphere and disintegrating at 44 miles per second ... much faster than the Taurids since the Earth plows into the meteor stream nearly head-on. This latter fact results in many fireballs, and about half of them leave trains of dust which can persist for minutes.

The Leonid meteors radiate from the constellation Leo, which can be seen well above the eastern horizon around 3:00 am. I would suggest getting up around moonset and find a good spot from which to observe with an unobstructed easterly view. Block any stray lights from your vision, and do dress warmly.

And finally, Ladd Observatory (http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Physics/Ladd/) on the corner of Hope Street and Doyle Avenue in Providence has reopened. Renovations have been completed and public viewing has resumed on every clear Tuesday evening from 7-9pm. The lens of the 12-inch Brashear refractor has also been cleaned, and the view of Jupiter and the Moon has been spectacular. Come see for yourself. Additionally, the famous 8¼-inch Alvan Clark refractor at Seagrave Memorial Observatory (http:/www.theskyscrapers.org) on Peeptoad Road in North Scituate has recently been refurbished and reinstalled. It is once again available to provide great astronomical views of the heavens during our public observing sessions every clear Saturday night from 7-9 pm. Member volunteers will be happy to share their love of astronomy with you using the many telescopes available at the Seagrave facility.