Special to CosmicTribune.com, October 28, 2024

Excerpts from weekly Sky&Telescope report.

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 26

■ Altair is the brightest star high in the southwest after dark. Brighter Vega is about three fists to its right, high toward the west.

Above Altair lurk two distinctive little constellations: Delphinus the Dolphin, hardly more than a fist at arm’s length to Altair’s upper left, and smaller, fainter Sagitta the Arrow, slightly less far to Altair’s upper right. If your sky is too light-polluted, try binoculars.

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 27

■ Draw a line from Altair (high in the southwest) to the right through Vega, and continue the line onward by half as far. There you are at the Lozenge: the pointy-nosed head of Draco. His nose points back to Vega.

MONDAY, OCTOBER 28

■ More about Altair: Just upper right of it now, by a finger-width at arm’s length, is orange Tarazed (Gamma Aquilae), Altair’s eternal little sidekick. It’s a modest magnitude 2.7 compared to Altair’s showy 0.7. But looks are deceiving. Altair looks so bright because it’s one of our near stellar neighbors, just 17 light-years away. Tarazed is an orange giant star about 380 light-years farther behind — and 170 times as luminous!

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 29

■ Can you find M33, the Triangulum Galaxy, the closest large galaxy to us after the famous one in Andromeda? It’s a good deal dimmer, with a low surface brightness that needs a dark sky. But in such a sky I find that it’s a fairly easy target in 10×50 binoculars. It’s about a third of the way from Alpha Trianguli (the sharp point of the Triangle) to Beta Andromedae (the middle star of Andromeda’s main line of three).

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 30

■ When night arrives now, the Great Square of Pegasus is still balanced on its corner very high in the southeast. But within two hours it turns around to lie level like a box very high toward the south.

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 31

■ This year Halloween evening is moonless, but it offers three bright planets. While twilight is still fading, catch Venus very low in the west-southwest. After dark, Saturn is the brightest little dot high toward the south-southeast. (Don’t confuse it with Fomalhaut, sparkling two fists below it.)

And by about 10 p.m., Jupiter has climbed up to dominate the east.

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 1

■ November fireballs? Every year from about late October through mid-November, a truly dazzling Taurid meteor just might take you by surprise in the night. If you get very lucky.

Normally the broad, weak, South and North Taurid meteor showers sputter along sparsely. Under ideal conditions you might see 5 or 10 ordinary little meteors per hour during the poorly defined, weeks-long maximum when the two branches of the shower overlap. Both include debris shed by Comet 2P/Encke, but a recent analysis shows that a host of other objects — near-Earth asteroids, collisional fragments, and dormant cometary nuclei — might be creating several overlapping streams of particles. Consequently, both Taurid components have long-lasting “maxima” that aren’t easy to pin down.

What makes the Taurids potentially exciting is that their small numbers are known for a high proportion of bright fireballs — occasionally, an extremely bright one that makes the news.

The Taurids strike the atmosphere at a relatively slow 19 miles (30 km) per second. If you see an especially bright, slow meteor these nights, check whether its line of flight, if traced backward far enough across the sky, would intersect more or less the Pleiades side of Taurus.

■ New Moon (exact at 8:47 a.m.)

By now Mars has drifted quite visibly out of line with Pollux and Castor in the early-morning sky.

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 2

■ Algol in Perseus, high in the east, should be in mid-eclipse, magnitude 3.4 instead of its usual 2.1, for a couple hours centered on 10:42 p.m. EDT; 7:42 p.m. PDT. Algol takes several hours to fade beforehand and to rebrighten after.

At any random time you look up at Algol, you have only a 1-in-30 chance of catching it at least 1 magnitude fainter than normal.

■ Daylight-saving time, observed in most of North America, ends at 2:00 a.m. Sunday morning. Clocks “fall back” one hour. Daylight time for North America runs from the second Sunday in March to the first Sunday in November; the rules last changed in 2007. Daylight time is not used in Hawaii, Saskatchewan, Puerto Rico, or in most of Arizona.

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 3

■ The Summer Triangle Effect. Here it is early November, but Deneb still shines right near the zenith as the stars come out. And brighter Vega is still not far from the zenith, toward the west. The third star of the “Summer” Triangle, Altair, remains very high in the southwest. They seem to have stayed there for a couple months! Why have they stalled out?

What you’re seeing is a result of sunset and darkness arriving earlier and earlier during autumn. Which means if you go out and starwatch soon after dark, you’re doing it earlier and earlier by the clock. This counteracts the seasonal westward turning of the constellations.

  Oct. 26-Nov. 3: Jupiter dominates the East, The Sky