 Welcome to the skies over Colorado for November 2021. I'm Staff Astronomer John Ennsworth of the Cherrywood Observatory and volunteer at the Little Thompson Observatory for Longmont Public Media. In the news this month, the most massive white dwarf yet discovered has been studied. It's got a pretty crazy name there, I won't try to read that out. But it is near the limit of what our models say, a white dwarf can be, if it gets a little bit bigger, it could become a neutron star, just dump some more stuff. It is also the most compact, just slightly bigger than the moon, our moon, and it's actually smaller than other white dwarfs because of its very high mass. So it's kind of paradoxal, but when they're less massive they're basically more fluffy. I don't know if I'd call it a teaspoon of material that weighs as much as a mountain, fluffy but it is. It's rotating 6.94 times a minute. The space station went for a spin for a second time. A Russian thruster fired unexpectedly while they were testing engines of a Soyuz capsule. It had been docked there since April. The station turned by 57 degrees, which is pretty alarming because all the links to Earth through radio communication rely on those antennas lining up. They keep it really under control most of the time. A different Russian module rotated the station 540 degrees back in the summer. It was about one and a half revolutions, so I left it upside down really bad. So hopefully they can get control of their thrusters. Am I going to go into detail on the space 10-year plan? We'll bring some of these out as highlights in the future, but in three main categories, the Decadal Astronomical Community Plan centers on worlds and suns and contexts, new messengers and new physics, and cosmic ecosystems. There's a bunch of different things underneath that taking us up in the decades in the future. Pretty cool. Things like the James Webb Space Telescope was planned in an earlier version of this type of advanced thinking. Big star parties are fading out for the depth of the winter. I didn't until making these videos realize how they really do shut off around Christmas, but in December they were known listed. There's three there, Georgia, Texas, and Mississippi. So, November is Astro 101. It was asteroid observing, because we're going to send you out to try to find one this time. When you're looking up from your backyard in asteroid, they look like stars. They're not moving in that evening with respect to the stars, they just aren't additional dim stars. And they're probably better seen in binoculars or a small telescope, but there is a possibility of catching one naked eye. The way you know that you actually found it is you go back out a day or two later and see if your star has moved. What I do is I will take a look at the constellation around where I think it is, kind of figure out where I can see this candidate, make like a made-up constellation, including it, and then see if that made-up constellation, or astrism, would be a better word for it, is broken. One of these stars is out of position from what I remember. You could also sketch it, or take a picture of it. But these asteroids are in an orbit around the sun, mainly far between Mars and Jupiter. There are some out at Jupiter, there are some that cross Mars and Earth's orbit. I'm not looking at those. So these main belt asteroids have an orbital period of about three to six years. Because we are going around the sun once a year, we catch up with each asteroid about every 15 to 18 months. Because we are going faster, we're in an orbit closer to the sun than these asteroids, we pass them, just like watching a semi-truck in the right lane go backwards out your car windows. You pass on the left, we pass these things, and they seem to go backwards or retrograde in the sky for about 45 days before and after they are straight out from us, from the sun, so up at midnight on the meridian. About 50 become brighter than 10th magnitude, putting it within reach of a small to medium telescope. So the human eye can see ideally down to about 6 magnitudes, 6.5 magnitudes, in a very dark location, very good eyes, young eyes, and our experience of observing the sky, you might be able to push it below the 6.8 area, that's possible. But basically Vesta 5 should be visible. Here's an image, it's not how they look, this is from missions, to the asteroid belt, but you can see the relative sizes. Series is the biggest, Vesta is the next largest, but Vesta has a brighter surface. We get the sky above your backyard for this month, we begin the month with a new moon, you should see a beautiful crescent passing Venus in the early part of the month. Illumination, first quarter on the 11th, full moon is backed up from the 31st of October last year to the 19th of November now, and the month ends with a third quarter in the pre-dawn sky. Plants are a great place for viewing, just after sunset in the evening as Venus, just after sunset, setting almost 3 hours after sunset, very bright, brilliant thing, just can't miss it. Also after sunset you have Jupiter and Saturn in the sky, Saturn sets around 10, Jupiter about 11, so Saturn is the slightly dimmer one between Jupiter and Venus, over in the western sky. Neptune is high in the southern sky, setting at 1am, Uranus is just rising in the eastern sky in the sunset hours. Here's the below of the sun going down, I've taken off the atmospheric below, so it's going to be bright, having the sun close to the horizon. Venus, Saturn, Jupiter, Neptune and Uranus just rising. You need to set at midnight, all that there is is Neptune and Uranus, Neptune is getting ready to set in the west, and Uranus is kind of high in the western sky, Uranus past the meridian. In the pre-dawn sky, Mercury is very close to the sun, you may get a glimpse very early in the month, if you're looking into the orangey yellow twilight glow, Mercury will stand out in that case, Mars is too close to the sun right now to see, there's Mars right down there, there's Mercury, Mercury is brighter than Mars at this point, Mars is beyond the sun and the solar system, so it's pretty far away. We will talk about comet Leonard next month, but there is a comet, it's very dim right now, but it's going to be bright enough as it gets into the inner solar system. So on November 1st sunrise at 7.29, by mid month it jumps to 6.44 because we changed its standard time on Sunday the 8th, and by the end of the month, the sunrise is at 7am, sunset way early at 4.36, the sun sinks from 36 degrees up in the southern sky at local noon down to 29 degrees, I'll say local noon because it's not exactly noon, you have to take into account the earth going faster and slower, and it's not quite perfectly circular orbit around the sun, it's called the equation of time if you want to look that up, that would be a good thing to hit in a future month. So the future object is, not really an object, but we're going to look at the Leonid meteor shower, you get some meteors visible from November 3rd all the way to the end of the month, as a meteorologist I can also say November 30th is the end of hurricane season, so it's also the end of the Leonid meteor season. Peaks on the 17th, not too far from Thanksgiving, it comes from the source comet 55p Temple Tuttle, and it's best right before dawn after the moon sets this month, and you can get pretty good rates 10 to 15 meteors per hour. Your observing challenge is the asteroid series, and good with binocular it will not look like this, it's just going to be a single point of starlight, might even have a twinkle to it, because it is so small. Magnitude 6.7 at its maximum would be a good binocular object. Check back, like I said before, a couple days later to see if that whole thing has moved. It's small, 466 kilometers in diameter, and on December 1st it'll be 1.76 earth sun distances. So here we are, December 1st a midnight right at the end of the month. There's a series right up here in Taurus, so here's the V of the Hades star cluster, the bright orange star of Aldebron, which is the fiery red eye of Taurus, and we have one horn up here, one horn over here, the body here, and right above is the little star cluster, the Pleiades of 410 light-years away. So it's in very easy to recognize territory, and it's up high at the end of the month. Let's take a look at astronomy events in the near Longmont, the Longmont Astronomical Society on November 18th, and I believe this is just through Zoom, they have Professor Dolores Kipp, Starstruck Space Weather for Humans and Technology, 7 p.m. I don't see anything on their site, seeing that they've got their monthly star party planned, so check the site, maybe you can find something I did not. Little Townsend Observatory, public nights are still canceled through the end of the month. Check the websites for things like this video. The Estus Park Memorial Observatory is still operating under small groups and reservations, doing three openings a week. Check out the site for all the details. Northern Colorado Astronomical Society via some webcast method. Dr. Joseph, I'd say Pace, Monsters in the Universe, new insight into black holes. Sorry if I got the last name incorrect, November 7th. This planetarium reopened and has limited capacity and covered 19 restrictions. The observatory might be closed for the Thanksgiving Christmas period. I did not see anything there, so maybe they'll pick up when things pick up again in January. And finally, instead of featured software, since I kind of ran through everything that I've used recently, we're covering historical missteps in astronomy in about 30 seconds. This would be the Flat Earth, and basically there's a number of ways to take a look at the world around you to see evidence that the Earth is not flat. The moon is round, as are other planets. You can see them go through phases with curved shadows on them. Ships vanish over the horizon as they go downward from your point of view that you would not see on a flat surface. Different constellations are visible in different latitudes. That would also not be the case. You'd be able to get the entire sky if you didn't have the body of a round thing behind you as the Earth goes around the Sun throughout the year. You can take a look at shacks, shadows and sticks at noon and reproduce the Aristophanes experiment. Aristophanes way back in the B.C. E. years determined the size of the Earth within a percent. So there are websites where you can use data from high schools using this lab and some very simple trig to even figure out the curvature of the Earth that way. If you go up in the mountains you can see farther from higher up. That's similar to the ships on the horizon observation. The need for time zones and how they're distributed across the map would only happen on a sphere. The shape of the Earth's shadow on the moon is always round during a lunar eclipse and that can happen in any direction of the sky. As the moon is rising, setting are high up in the sky. It's always a round shadow. Gravity and the focal pendulum can be set up in different locations and a disk would have a different distribution and reaction to the center of mass of a disk versus the center of mass of a sphere. And of course if you just get high up into the atmosphere on balloons or rockets you can see the curvature of the Earth is curved no matter where you take off. If you have any additions or corrections, contact me at channelsworthhaggmail.com. This has been the skies over Colorado for November 2021. Keep hooking up.