LCROSS has come and gone — and the impact was more of a whimper than a bang. The weather here didn’t cooperate for amateur observers, but it turns out there was nothing to see anyway — even the professional and space-born observatories didn’t see a debris plume. As I write this, there’s been no word on why there was no debris plume or whether the spectroscopes saw evidence of water, and NASA is being a bit cagey compared to their huge media blitz leading up to the impact. With any luck we’ll hear some results following the big AGU meeting in December.
Meanwhile, as November opens, Mars is passing through the Beehive cluster in Cancer. There’s a big moon (it’s full on November 2) but that shouldn’t interfere with getting pretty wide-field views of planets and bright clusters.
Jupiter is an excellent early evening object, transiting just before sunset and setting by midnight. As always, it’s full of detail, though this year the weather seems relatively quiet — not a lot of festoons or interesting new storms compared to some years. Still, there’s plenty to look at!
On November 23rd, try looking for Jupiter about 4 degrees south of the moon, plus a bit east if you’re looking in the morning, or a bit west in the afternoon. It should be easy to find in binoculars or a telescope with the moon so nearby, but even with the naked eye, Jupiter is surprisingly obvious during the day if the sky is clear and you know where to look.
If that’s not enough of a challenge for you, there’s a Europa shadow transit that same day, the 23rd, starting at about 3pm. Can you see the shadow on Jupiter’s face even in the daytime? I suspect not, but it sounds like a fun experiment. Europa itself starts its transit about two hours earlier, but seeing that seems very unlikely.
Of course, once you find Jupiter once, you know where to look and you should be able to find it for the rest of the month if you look at about the same place and time.
Mercury is mostly too close to the sun to see, but we’ll get a peek at month’s end as it emerges into the evening sky.
Venus is in the morning sky, but not very far from the Sun. Saturn, too, is a morning object this month.
Daylight Savings Time ends on the morning of November 1, so don’t forget to set your clocks back an hour on Halloween night! At least if you’re a Luddite like me who still owns clocks that don’t reset themselves.