Sights are worth the chill
With the end of daylight-saving time, it's dark enough for stargazing by 7 p.m. You can make the stars your old friends and still get a very good night's sleep, but the tradeoff is that you need to bundle up a little bit more and be prepared to have your lungs take in some colder November air. It's worth it, though, as your eyes will take in some great celestial sights!
There's a comet in the sky to start out the month. It's called comet 17p Holmes and up until recently it's been a faint, obscure comet. But it has suddenly flared up in brightness to the point where you can see it with the naked eye.
It's visible all night long and for about the next week or so you should be able to see it with the naked eye, although you can see it a lot better with a pair of binoculars or small telescope.
I think you'll like what you see. It'll appear as a ghostly smudge with a slight tail to it and a bright nucleus. The best way to find it in the early evening is to look for the bright star Capella in the low northeast sky. It's by far the brightest star in that part of the sky. Comet Holmes will look like a fuzzy star to the upper right of Capella, about one to two fist-widths at arm's length. Again you'll see it much better with binoculars or a small telescope.
Even though it's still autumn, some of the early bright constellations of winter are already on the rise on the great celestial stage.
First off, you can't help but see a beautiful little star cluster shining brightly in the low eastern sky resembling a tiny dipper. It's not the Little Dipper. That's in the high northern sky. What you're witnessing is the Pleiades star cluster, the best naked eye star cluster in the night sky. See how many stars you can see in it with the naked eye. Can you see six? If you can your eyes are about average. If you can see seven stars you've really been eating your carrots! If you can see more than seven, you have super vision or you're just kidding yourself.
A lot of you may know the Pleiades star cluster by its nickname, "The Seven Little Sisters." Believe me, though, there are a lot more than seven shiners there. With just an average pair of binoculars, you may see over a hundred stars! The Pleiades are a group of young stars almost 2,400 trillion miles away that were born together about 100 million years ago.
Just to the lower left of Pleiades you'll see a really bright star. That's Capella, the brightest star in the constellation Auriga the Chariot Driver. This charioteer is hauling a mama goat on his shoulder with three of her kid goats, something I'm sure you run across all the time.
Just to the left of Capella you'll see three faint stars that form a little triangle. These are the baby goats. It must have been a really wild party when the Greeks dreamed up that constellation.
In the southeastern sky you can see the Great Square of Pegasus, the torso of the wonderful constellation Pegasus the Winged Horse. The square actually looks like a diamond since it is turned diagonally to our view. You can see a long arced line of stars off the star on the left corner the diamond/square that makes up the wing of the big celestial horse.
In the western sky there are still some summer constellations to be visually had.
Among the brighter ones are Cygnus the Swan, Lyra the Harp, and Aquila the Eagle. We won't see them for too much longer because as our Earth orbits the sun these stars of summer will gradually set earlier and earlier in the evening. By around the first part of 2008, they'll be setting before evening twilight ends and we won't see them in our evening skies again until late next spring.
Unfortunately, there are no planets to be found in the early evening skies this month. The bright planet Jupiter that we saw for most of October in the low southwest sky now sets before the end of twilight. For you late nighters, though, you can watch the planet Mars rise in the eastern sky after about 9 p.m. It's bright and definitely red as it climbs above the horizon.
Next month around Christmas, Mars will be at its closest point to the Earth in over two years. Stayed turned for more on the Holiday Mars invasion!
Mike Lynch is an amateur astronomer and professional broadcast meteorologist for WCCO Radio in Minneapolis and author of the book "Pennsylvania Starwatch," available at bookstores and at his Web site www.lynchandthestars.com
