The Nantucket Sky in November 2008
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Courtesy of the Maria Mitchell Association
The Sun (for the first and last days of the month)
Sunrise: 7:12 am; 6:46 am
Sunset: 5.35 pm; 4:12 pm
The Moon
First Quarter: November 05, 11:03 pm
Full Moon: November 13, 01:17 am
Last Quarter: November 19, 04:31 pm
New Moon: November 27, 11:55 am
Planets visible with an unaided eye
Mercury and Saturn: Can be observed briefly at dawn in the eastern part of the sky.
Venus: an ‘Evening Star’, very bright in the western sky after sunset.
Jupiter: Still a bright object in the south-west in the evening. It will be closer and closer to Venus and the two brightest planets will meet in an impressive conjunction, 2 degrees (four moon’s diameters) apart, on November 30 and December 1.
Mars: too close to the Sun.
Meteor Showers
Leonid: November 17, 1-2 hours before sunrise. Periodically (every 33 years), when the comet Tempel-Tuttle, the source of the ‘meteoroids’ producing this shower, returns to the Sun, Leoind may be very strong. The last really spectacular one was in 1966 (up to 100,000 meteors per hour!). Another historic Leonid shower might have happened ten years ago, in November 1998, but it was much less impressive than that of 1966. In the years between the comet’s perihelion passages, Leonid is a relatively weak meteor shower (approximately 10 meteors per hour). This year, a waning gibbous moon will seriously interfere. MMA will not offer an open morning for the observations of this shower, but those of you who get early easily may be rewarded with a few bright meteors at 4-5 am
Zodiac Constellations in the evening
Capricorn, Aquarius, Pisces, Aries, Taurus (from west to east, in the southern and south-eastern part of the sky).
(Eastern Daylight Saving Time is used until 2:00 am on November 2; after that Eastern Standard Time is used)