Greetings, skywatchers! Here is what is going on in the skies this month:
This weekend the Leonid meteor shower will reach its peak. This shower is the debris trail from Comet Tempel-Tuttle and was first observed at the beginning of the tenth century. The Leonids are not normally a prominent shower compared to other showers during the year, but they have been known to produce brilliant fireballs on occasion. The shower is named for the constellation Leo, which is the radiant, or area of the sky where the meteors appear to come from. You don’t need to wait for Leo to come into view, however, as the meteors can be seen in a clear, dark sky just by looking up. Those of you who live in metropolitan areas may want to seek out a park or dark field away from street lighting for better observation. The good news is that the Moon will be setting before 2 am local time, improving the darkness of the sky.
Throughout the summer, Mars was an exciting feature in the sky and it’s still quite prominent during the fall, Look for it this month in the southern sky after dark as it continues to slowly fade from its summer brightness.
The Moon reaches third quarter today (Friday) and becomes the Frost Moon on the 23rd. You may also hear this Full Moon referred to as the Beaver Moon; at this time of the year, North American beavers will build their dams for the winter months, and the Full Moon provides them with convenient outdoor lighting!
Note also that on Friday the Full Moon will rise just a bit more than one degree from Aldebaran (Alpha Tauri). You may be familiar with this red star due to its proximity to the Pleiades (aka the Seven Sisters), the cluster of stars just to the right. Aldebaran is Arabic and roughly means “the follower” because it is located just past the Pleiades. In medieval times it was also known as Cor Tauri, “the heart of the bull”, befitting its status as the brightest star in Taurus.
You may have heard this week that a new exoplanet has been discovered orbiting Barnard’s Star, which is the second nearest star system to our own Solar System at a distance of just 5.4 light years. That is about 30 trillion miles from Earth (in the constellation Ophiuchus), but it’s just next door in our interstellar neighborhood! This “super-Earth” is over three times larger than our own world, and we don’t know much about it yet, but further observation will improve our knowledge of the planet and any other potential worlds in the system.
You might be wondering who the star is named for. E.E. Barnard did not discover the star but he was the first to observe the interesting characteristics of its proper motion in 1916 (the proper motion of a star is essentially its angular motion across the sky relative to more distant objects).
Looking-Glass Tea 
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