Melbourne Sun times

Date	Rise	Set	Day length	Solar noon*
Friday 1st	6:13am	7:54pm	13:41hours	1:03pm
Saturday 11th	6:03am	8:05pm	14:02hours	1:04pm
Saturday 21st	5:55am	8:16pm	14:20hours	1:06pm
Thursday 30th	5:52am	8:25pm	14:33hours	1:08pm

^*When the sun is at its highest, crossing the meridian or local longitude.

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Moon phases

Phase	Date
New Moon	Friday 1st
First Quarter	Saturday 9th
Full Moon	Saturday 16th
Third Quarter	Saturday 23rd

Moon distances

Lunar apogee (furthest from Earth) is on Tuesday 26th at 405,314 km.

Lunar perigee (closest to Earth) is on Thursday 14th at 360,109 km.

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Planets

Mercury 
The planet closest to the Sun is visible from around 8;30pm low in the west before is sets at 9:30pm with these times a little earlier each evening during the month.

Venus 
The bright ‘evening star’ can easily be seen shortly after sunset in the west before it slips below the horizon by 11pm. Its appearance will also be a little later each evening over the course of the month.

Mars 
The Red Planet is in our skies this month from around 1:30am in the north before fading in the early dawn light by around 5:30am. During the month Mars will appear a little earlier each night.

Jupiter 
The largest planet in our solar system is heading to Opposition when it will be opposite to the Sun as seen from Earth; that is, Earth will be between the Sun and Jupiter. This giant planet will be seen around 11:40pm in the north-east and be clear until 5:40am as dawn’s light overwhelms it. Each night it will appear earlier until by the end of November it will visible from 10pm.

Saturn 
This faint and yellowish planet is visible this month high in the north from 8:30pm early in the month, and from 9pm by month’s end, before setting around 2:50am in the west.

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Meteors

November has two meteor showers; the Taurids and the Leonids, and in good dark skies up to 10-15 meteors could per hour could be seen.

The Taurids are bright, slow moving with colourful fireballs and occur in the first week of November in Taurus the Bull near the Pleiades star cluster and also near the red star Aldebaran.

The Leonids are high speed meteors that leave trains lasting several minutes. They appear in Leo which rises around 4am in the north-east from 13th - 20th but their peak on the morning of the 18th. They arise from particles left by Comet Tempel-Tuttle as it orbits the Sun every 33 years, but the number of Leonid meteors has been declining over recent years with perhaps only 15 per hour.

Explore:
NASA Leonid News
EarthSky Leonid Shower
ESA About the Leonids

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International Space Station

ISS orbits every 90 minutes at an average distance of 400 km appearing like a bright star moving slowly across the night sky. Here are some of the brightest passes expected this month over Melbourne and Central Victoria.

Morning

Wednesday 20th 5:09am to 5:15am North-West to East-South-East
Saturday 23rd 4:19am to 4:23am North-West to South-East

Evening

There are no bright evening passes this month. 

Heavens Above gives predictions for visible passes of space stations and major satellites, live sky views and 3D visualisations. Be sure to first enter your location under ‘Configuration’.

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Stars and constellations

In the north

The constellation of Pegasus, the winged horse is in the north this month with Andromeda low in the north-west. Aquila (the eagle) and its principal star Altair (Alpha Aquilae) is in the north-west.

Low in the north this and next month is the Andromeda Galaxy (Messier 31 or M31), the furthest object visible to the naked eye at 2.5 million light years. This larger spiral galaxy contains perhaps 1 trillion stars and takes up an area in the sky larger than the moon. In 4 billion years our Milky Way and Andromeda may ‘collide’ and pass through each other. If they do, after several encounters they might ultimately merge to become one large elliptical galaxy with their central supermassive black holes co-orbiting and eventually joining to become an even larger one. However, there is uncertainty about all of this since other bodies in our immediate neighbourhood, such as the nearby Clouds of Magellan and the small Triangulum spiral galaxy (M33) may exert enough gravitational influence to prevent a collision and merger. Time will tell… over the next few billion years.

Enjoy a Milky Way and Andromeda collision-merger simulation:

Explore:
NASA - Hubble Milky Way Collision
Science - Milky Way May Escape Collision
NASA Triangulum Galaxy M33

In the west

Spectacular Scorpius is now in the west. The red-giant star Antares (Alpha Scorpii) sits as the middle of three stars that form the arachnid’s body. Sagittarius, the centaur-archer, is above with its bow and arrow forming the well-known Teapot asterism. Further up sits Capricorn, the sea goat, the strange goat with the tail of a fish.

In the east

Orion, the hunter, rises late in the evening this month, one foot being the blue-giant star Rigel (Beta Orionis) and a shoulder the red-giant star Betelguese (Alpha Orionis). The bright stars known as Orion’s Belt are Alnitak, Alnilam and Mintaka (and form the base of the Saucepan asterism), while Orion’s scabbard (the saucepan’s handle) hanging from his belt contains in its centre the beautiful Orion nebula - a vast gas cloud 1300 light years away where stars formation is occurring. Note that Orion appears upside down in the Southern Hemisphere.

Also, upside down is Taurus, the bull, with the red-giant star Antares (Alpha Scorpii), rising in the north-east later in the night. In the south-east past Orion is Canis Major, greater dog, and its star Sirius (Alpha Canis Majoris), the brightest star visible at night and also referred to as The Dog Star.

Approaching summer, the night sky from north-east to south-east will include a diverse range of features to enjoy.

In the south

Low in the south this month is Crux (Southern Cross) with the two Pointers, Alpha and Beta Centauri, to its right in the constellation Centaurus. In the south-east shines the second brightest star at night Canopus (Alpha Carinae), the principal star for the constellation Carina, the Keel.

The broad band of the Milky Way arcs from south-east along the western horizon to north-west. During the night as the Earth rotates to the east it will ‘wheel’ across the sky so that by 3am it will stretch from west to east.

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On this day

1st 1963, then largest radio telescope, the Puerto Rico Arecibo Observatory, opens utilising a natural valley and transceiver suspended from pylons on nearby peaks.

3nd 1957, Laika, a 3-year husky-Samoyd dog, became the first animal into orbit in Sputnik 2 (USSR). While never intended to return to Earth, she expired from heat stress after only a few hours.

3rd 1973, Mariner 10 (USA) launches to Mercury, the first probe to use a gravitational ‘slingshot’ around a planet to reach an objective (in this case, Venus).

4th 2003, largest solar flare recorded causes radio blackouts and saturates satellites, and was associated with a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) many times larger than Earth leaving the Sun at 2,300 kph.

8th 1656, birth of second Astronomer Royal Edmund Halley who calculated several historical comets to be the same. He successfully predicted its regular 76-year return. It posthumously carries his name.

9th 1934, birth of American astrophysicist and science communicator Carl Sagan.

12th 2014, First landing on a comet and direct surface images of Comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko by Philae lander from ESA’s Rosetta probe.

12th 1980, Voyager 1 (USA) has historic close encounter with Saturn at 124,000km. It then flew by moon Titan which precluded going on to Uranus or Neptune, although both were later visited by Voyager 2.

13th 1971, Mariner 9 (USA) is the first spacecraft to orbit another planet, Mars. Months of a planet-wide dust storm finally cleared to allow pictures of the surface.

15th 1738, discoverer of Uranus and infrared radiation, William Herschel, is born.

14th 2003, Sedna, a TNO (Trans Neptunian Object) is discovered in a 11,400 year elongated orbit, one of the most distant objects known in the Solar System.

16th 1965, Venera 3 (USSR) is launched to Venus becoming the first probe to reach the surface of another world.

16th 1974, first radio message sent into space (USA/Puerto Rico). ‘Arecibo Message’ to star cluster M13 25,000 light years away took 3 min. Its 1,679 binary 1’s and 0’s if arranged in 23 columns and 73 rows will reveal visual information (prime numbers 23 x 73 = 1,679).

17th 1970, Lunokhod 1 (‘Moon Walker’, USSR) first remote-controlled moon rover. Delivered by lander Luna 17, it drove 10km and lasted 321 Earth days, far longer than the expected 3 months.

20th 1998, First module for the ISS, Russia’s 12 metre Zaryu (‘Sunrise’) or Functional Cargo Block, is launched beginning a multi-module multi-year assembly of the space station in low Earth orbit.

26th 2012, Curiosity rover (USA) arrives in Mars’ Gale Crater after a high-speed entry and first use of an innovative final landing technique – the ‘sky crane’.

27th 1971, first probe to reach the Martian surface is Mars 2 (USSR) although it crashes in the process.

27th 2001, first detection of composition of exoplanet’s atmosphere – by Hubble Telescope for planet Osiris orbiting a sun-like star 150 light years away.

28th 1967, Cambridge postgraduate student Susan Jocelyn Bell discovers the first pulsar, dubbed LGM1 for “little green men”. Its regular 1.3 sec radio pulse revealed it to be a rapidly spinning neutron star – the first of many to be identified.

29th 1967, Australia becomes the third nation after USSR, USA and France to launch a satellite from its own territory. The 45kg WRESAT-1 (Weapons Research Establishment Satellite) made 642 polar orbits until re-entry 11 days later.

30th 1609, Galileo studies the Moon with his improved telescope, and while not the first to do so he was the first to explain mountains and craters, and chart lunar features and their heights.

30th 1954, Ann Elizabeth Hodges of Alabama, USA, becomes the first person injured by a meteorite. She was badly bruised by a 5kg rock that crashed through her roof, deflected off a radio cabinet, and hit her while she was asleep on the couch.