This one starts off with a huge moon – the “Beaver Moon,” the North Americans call it because the beavers start building their large domed nests of sticks and logs in the creeks about now, in preparation for their nippy winters.
The Boss wasn’t confident Wednesday night would be clear for it, but he reckoned a clearing of the clouds was a chance. It’s the second supermoon in a row this year and, it we don’t get a clear view over the next few nights, the best might come in December, when the harvest should be under way, leaving some dust in the air to add some richer colour to it.
But for me, November is all about the Leonids, the fastest meteor shower of the year.
They kick off next week and will peak on Monday the 17 th, but continue right through the month. Most nights I’ll see them from about midnight, and they peak just before dawn, at a predicted rate of up to 15 an hour.
They are named after the constellation of Leo because they appear to come from that direction. Currently Leo isn’t rising until 3.30am, so later is better.
I’m attached to Leo because it dominates the low northern sky during our Easter camp in late March or April - and that’s a good time of year too, but Leo has dusted off the Leonids by then.
It’s one of the twelve zodiac constellations – Leo the Lion – and you can pick it with its distinctive reverse question-mark shape. The Boss grew up calling it the Sickle. It sits between the less-distinctive Cancer and Virgo constellations, so to my mind, Leo owns the autumn.
Its namesake meteors come from the remains of the comet Temple-Tuttle and are renowned for their spectacular meteor storms that occur around every 33 years. These storms are spectacular, with a thousand meteors an hour, with some exceeding 100,000 an hour.
The Leonids are famous for these, particularly the meteor storm of 1833, although November 1966 was memorable too, and storms in the early 2000s produced up to 3,000 meteors an hour.
They vary because the Earth moves through different meteoroid trails left by the comet, which spread out or are affected differently by Jupiter, or radiation from the sun.
These streams consist of solid particles, trapped in frozen gases most of the time until they encounter the heat of the sun when they hit Jupiter’s orbit.
The Boss says the Temple-Tuttle comet has a retrograde orbit, where it rotates in a direction opposite to the sun’s rotation – whereas all the planets orbit around the sun in the same direction as the sun rotates on its axis.
This has the effect of accelerating the Leonids, which hit the earth’s atmosphere at 70 km per second. The larger Leonids are around 1cm across and generate fine, bright meteors.
Why not join me for a peak? I don’t know how many Novembers I have left. Woof!
17°C