For November, the Moon will be last quarter on November 1st, the Hunter's Moon occurring on October 26th. The first week of November will thus find the Moon waning and rising later each evening.

The waning crescent moon is passing about 3 degrees north of Venus on November 5th. The new moon occurs on November 9th. The next two weeks find the moon waxing in the evening sky. A slender crescent moon appears five degrees south of Jupiter on November 12th. First quarter moon sits high in the sky and half-lit at sunset on November 17th. The full moon is the Frost Moon (at least in the days before Global Warming!), and occurs on November 24th. The last week of November finds the moon waning in the morning sky, passing by brightening Mars on November 25th.

While the naked eye, dark adapted by several minutes away from any bright lights, is a wonderful instrument to stare up into deep space, far beyond our own Milky Way, binoculars are better for spotting specific deep sky objects. For a detailed map of northern hemisphere skies, about Halloween visit the www.skymaps.com website and download the map for November 2007; it will have a more extensive calendar, and list of best objects for the naked eyes, binoculars, and scopes on the back of the map. Also available as the next month begins is wonderful video exploring the November 2007 sky, featuring many different objects, available from the Hubble Space Telescope website at: http://hubblesite.org/explore astronomy/tonightssky/.

64 eff Helix Nebula LPGBa Venus dominates the dawn, rising almost three hours before the Sun as November begins. She appears half lit at greatest elongation on October 28th, and will get smaller (from 23" to 18" of arc) but more fully lit (from 52% to 66% illuminated by month's end.) She is now on the far side of her orbit, and will pass behind the Sun in early 2008. It was Galileo in 1611 who noted that Venus goes through this entire phase cycle, and correctly deduced this proved she orbited the Sun, not us.

Covered with sulfuric acid clouds, her bright disk reveals no visible details in the scopes.

Giant Jupiter dominates the SW sky at the beginning of November, but will be lost in the Sun's glare by Thanksgiving. Any small scope will reveal what Galileo marveled at in 1609; four large moons, all bigger or similar to ours in size, orbit it in a line along Jupiter's equator.

So get out the old scope, and focus on Jupiter for a constantly changing dance of the moons around the giant world before the Sun swallows it up.

East of Jupiter is the teapot shape of Sagittarius, which marks the heart of our Milky Way Galaxy, but the best view of our Galaxy lies overhead now. The brightest star of the northern hemisphere, Vega dominates the sky in the northwest. To the northeast of Vega is Deneb, the brightest star of Cygnus the Swan, now almost overhead at sunset. To the south is Altair, the brightest star of Aquila the Eagle, the third member of the three bright stars that make the Summer Triangle so obvious in the NW these clear autumn evenings.

High in the east is the square of Pegasus is a beacon of fall. South of it lies the only bright star of Fall, Fomalhaut. If the southern skies of Fall look sparse, it is because we are looking away from our Galaxy into the depths of intergalactic space. It is just north of Fomalhaut that you will find the closest and largest of the planetary nebulae, NGC 7293 or "the Helix". On the internet, a HST image of it has been referred to as "The Eye of God", and Bob Gaskin's fine photo of this funeral wreath around a red giant star exhaling its last gasp supports this view. But it is being reincarnated as a white dwarf as we watch; note the tiny star, no larger than our Earth, which is the giant's core that was not pushed outward into space. The nebula is about 3 light years across, and around 650 light years distant. It is believed the stellar strip tease began about 10,000 years ago, and in another 10,000 years, the ionized gases will cool and fade away like a cosmic ghost.

The constellation Cassiopeia makes a striking W, well up in the NE as the Big Dipper sets in the NW. Polaris lies about midway between them.

She contains many nice star clusters for binocular users in her outer arm of our Milky Way, extending to the NE now. Her daughter, Andromeda, starts with the NE corner star of Pegasus'' Square, and goes NE with two more bright stars in a row. It is from the middle star, beta Andromeda, that we proceed about a quarter the way to the top star in the W of Cassiopeia, and look for a faint blur with the naked eye.

M-31, the Andromeda Galaxy, is the most distant object visible with the naked eye, lying about 2.5 million light years distant.

To the northeast, Andromeda's hero, Perseus, rises. Between him and Cassiopeia is the fine Double Cluster, faintly visible with the naked eye and two fine binocular objects in the same field. Perseus contains the famed eclipsing binary star Algol, where the Arabs imagined the eye of the gorgon Medusa would lie. It fades to a third its normal brightness for six out of every 70 hours, as a larger but cooler orange giant covers about 80% of the smaller but hotter and thus brighter companion as seen from Earth. Check it out on a clear November evening, and see it the gorgon is winking at you. If so, then instead of being as bright as Polaris, Algol fade to be only as bright as kappa Persei, the star just to its south. Look at Perseus' feet for the famed Pleiades cluster (the Seven Sisters) to rise, a sure sign of bright winter stars to come. In fact, yellow Capella, a giant star the same temperature and color as our much smaller Sun, rises at 7 PM as November begins. Next month, more on Orion and company, and also on the fine opposition of Mars coming up at the end of December...a Christmas treat for astronomers.

For more information on the Escambia Amateur Astronomers, visit website at www.eaaa.net or call our sponsor, Dr. Wayne Wooten at PJC at (850) 484-1152, or e-mail wwooten@pjc.edu.