 Welcome to The Skies over Colorado for November 2020. I'm staff astronomer John Innsworth from Longmont Public Media of Cherrywood Observatory and volunteer at the Little Thompson Observatory in Berthd. Astronomy news this month. NASA's Osiris Rex has stowed its bite out of the asteroid Bennu. This is an image of the robot storing the sample on board. It did so earlier this week. It dug about 19 inches below the surface and got between a half and one and a quarter pounds of material. So really very good. Osiris Rex launched September 8th 2016th and it may return material March 2021 that has yet to be fully nailed down. There's a picture of Bennu. This may be an unusual one to cover but SpaceX is opening its Starlink satellite urinet to public beta testers. You must purchase Starlink ground equipment for about $500 and pay $100 monthly fee for the service. There's a picture of one of the launches. They are launched 60 per batch starting around May 2019. The reason a mouse to astronomers is because even though they're working to make these less reflective, at least soon after launch. They do reflect a lot of sunlight in the evening in the morning sky and definitely mar astronomers view of the universe. A mystery has been solved in astronomy. Fast radio bursts now have a known cause. These are very powerful radio bursts that last only milliseconds .001 second. None other than to be formed by magnetars or magnetic stars. These are stellar remnants, neutron stars that form an extremely powerful magnetic field. They have flares that erupt on the surface. It takes a while for that material to leave and then the next flare seems to impact with the earlier particles releasing a colossal amount of energy. This is a month's worth of solar energy in that tiny twinkling of time. Earth's magnetic field is 10 to the minus 5 Tesla or the magnetic fields around these magnetars approach 10 to the 9th to 10 to the 11th. That is fantastically, ridiculously powerful. Well, we're leaving fall and heading deep into the winter. Traditionally, there aren't very many star parties over the winter because of the harsh conditions. Even if the nights are long and the skies are beautiful, the deep south sky gaze and semi-hook is still on for November 10th through 15th, but the Death Valley Star Party has been canceled. Your astronomy 101 for this month is what makes stars twinkle. Starlight is a tiny stream of photons coming from very, very, very distant light sources. They are, from our point of view, very, very close to a single point source of light. The atmosphere is turbulent with warm air rising, cool air sinking. These different bubbles of air have different densities, warmer being less dense, cooler being more dense. So they act like random prisms that bend the light this way and that and even smear the light apart like the prism does, making little flickers of color. Stars hot overhead don't twinkle very much because there's very little atmosphere between you and outer space. It may only be about five or ten miles of pretty thick stuff. A long path coming in from the horizon has a long way to go in a lot of atmosphere to distort it, redden it and make it blur and twinkle. Stars, being point sources of light, can get jostled around very easily and you see a smear-twinkly image from a star when the seeing is not good. Planets have some size. So even if it jitters around a little bit, there's paths through the atmosphere that kind of create the original image right where it is. You can see in the telescope of binoculars that it's fuzzier, but to the eye, just looking up into the sky, planets are always overlapping themselves. So as a general rule of thumb, we must see seeing this really bad, like right after a very powerful cold front came through in the winter, stars twinkle and planets do not. Another neat thing that Mr. Does is it bends moonlight and sunlight from below the horizon to where you can see it. The sunrise and sunset charts you have are corrected for this, but if you know where the sun actually is, the sun rises a little earlier than it should and stays in the sky a little longer than it should. Let's take a look at the skies above your backyard. Okay at the moon we had the full moon on Halloween night. That was a blue moon. It's the first full moon since 1944, if I found that out correctly. So we have the last quarter, November 8th, new moon, middle of the month, first quarter, the day before Thanksgiving and the very last day of the month is our full moon, just like in my planets in November. In the dusk and evening sky, down in the southwest, you'll see Jupiter first, then Saturn, Jupiter being the brighter one. They set before midnight, but Mars is high in the sky, in the eastern sky at sunset. So here's Jupiter, Saturn, Mars is way up here, Neptune's up here too, but it's just hard to see. On either side of midnight, Neptune crosses the meridian hour or so after sunset, Uranus crosses the meridian a couple hours later. Mars is up basically all night and it's very bright for Mars, but is beginning to dim. We're starting to leave it behind. So looking out at midnight, or just after midnight, and see Mars down in the southwestern sky now, Uranus up here having crossed the meridian, Neptune just beginning to set. In the morning sky we've got very bright Venus and Mercury is going to be at its greatest elongation on the 10th, which means it's as high above the Sun as it will get this time. Venus rises a couple hours or more before sunrise, but it's beginning to dim. In the pre-dawn sky of November 10th, when Mercury is at its best, it's located here, or Venus right above. Here's the Sun just beginning to come up and in reality this sky in the east would be getting quite bright at this point. See a little sliver moon as it's heading towards noon on the 10th. November 1st, we just set the clocks back, so the sunrise switched to 6.29 a.m. with the sunset at 4.47, about 10 hours and a half of daylight. Looking at the end of the month, November 30th, the sunrise is now backed up half hour to 7 a.m. Sunset is actually at 4.36. I'll be driving home in the dark and the day shortens to nine hours and a half. It is a whole hour over this month. The altitude of the Sun at local noon will drop from 35 degrees down to 29 degrees, only a third of the way up from the southern horizon to the zenith. Our feature object predictably is Mars this time. This is a NASA JPL image. You won't see that from the surface of the earth because of that twinkling and other reasons it's far. In binoculars, Mars kind of looks like this, a little fuzzy dot. In a small telescope, you'll get maybe some darker patches with the lava fields, a hint of a polar ice cap on one side. There's a little whiteness on the upper left. So you can get some features in a small telescope with Mars. Your observing challenge this month will be the minima of algal. The constellation Perseus is kind of high up in the eastern sky in the evening. The brightest star is Mirfak over here on the left. Down this leg of the constellation is the next brightest star, Algo. It dims very noticeably. That dimness lasts about two hours and it occurs every almost 2.9 days. It goes from a bright, reasonably bright 2.1 magnitude down to a noticeably dim 3.4. It's 30% dimmer. This is an eclipsing binary. You have two stars orbiting each other and one goes in front of the other. The dimmer one blocking more light. There's a little dip on the opposite side but it's hard to notice. Taking a look at the beginning of one of the minima this month, it's a good time to see it. It can be November 12th, just after 10 o'clock to 11 p.m. Looking into the eastern sky here's Orion coming up, Taurus, the Pleiades, and then the upper left is Perseus and there's Algo right there. So straight up in the east, just after 10 p.m., go out an hour or two before that. Take a look at how bright it is and then come out after 10, maybe around 10.30, and see how dim it has become. If you stay up till midnight or one, it will return to its full brightness. Astronomy events near Longmont Astronomical Society. November 19th will have a zoom meeting, our galaxy, the app and the real thing by Bill Sumi. I did not write that in there, sorry. November 21st would have been their open space star party but that's canceled still. Would have been at 5.30 p.m. because the nights are getting so long. Little Thompson Observatory's public night. They're so close to early April now of 2021 but we may begin zoom meetings in November so keep an eye on starkids.org for that. Estes Park Memorial Observatory is going to be close to the end of the year now. Keep an eye on what they might be doing early next year of angelsabove.org. Northern Colorado Astronomical Society. November 5th at 6.15 p.m. so this will be an archive I'm sure. Dr. Jeremy Darling talking about our universe via webcast. You have to go to nocoastro.org and request the link. Fisculatarium is doing dome to home virtual programs every Wednesday at 7. Then November 19th at 7 p.m. they have fires flooding heatwaves drought extreme events and changing climate. I didn't mark the speaker down for that either. Sorry about that. And their open house observatory evenings are still canceled. In my further reading section this month old school star atlases they've been largely replaced by apps and programs. But I like books. The Cambridge Star Atlas is a good one by Wilterian. Turn Left at Orion is a good beginners guide. Burnham Slushall Handbooks are old but classics. Volume 1 and volume 2 take you through the constellations alphabetically and highlight many of the objects that you can observe in the telescope and binoculars in them. If you have any additions or corrections contact me at gmail.com. This has been the skies over Colorado for November 2020. Keep looking up.