[upbeat music]
Preston: What's up for November?
Seeking out the Pleiades,
the Moon with Jupiter and Saturn,
and understanding Earthshine.
Evenings in November are a good time
to start looking for the Pleiades.
This bright cluster of stars
is a well-known site to most stargazers
and is best enjoyed in the cooler
fall and winter months in the Northern Hemisphere.
The Pleiades is what's known
as an open star cluster.
It's a loosely-bound grouping
of a couple thousand stars that formed together
and are slowly drifting apart over time.
A handful of the brightest stars in the cluster
are visible with the unaided eye,
and with binoculars or a telescope
you can see hundreds.
Astronomers estimate the age of the cluster
is only about 100 million years.
It's located a bit more than 400 light years away.
The brightest stars in the Pleiades
are many times brighter than our own star, the Sun.
In fact, if you were to visit
the Pleiades and look homeward,
you wouldn't even be able to see the Sun
without a small telescope.
On cool, November evenings,
look for the Pleiades in the east
in the couple of hours after dark.
The cluster rises to its highest point around midnight.
You can also enjoy an early morning view
of the Pleiades near the Moon,
before dawn, on November 2nd.
[whoosh]
On November 18th and 19th,
enjoy a lovely crescent moon
near Jupiter and Saturn after sunset.
The two planets have been brilliant highlights
of the night sky for much of this year,
and are now getting closer together in advance
of their super-close pairing in mid-December.
More about that next month,
but for now, be sure to watch as they draw
a little nearer to each other each week.
[whoosh]
You may have marveled at how brightly a full moon
can light up a nighttime landscape,
but have you ever noticed how Earth
can illuminate the night side of the Moon?
This eerily beautiful glow is called Earthshine.
It's sunlight that's been reflected off of Earth,
then bounced off the Moonand back to our eyes.
Earthshine is easiest to observe
in the few days before and after the new moon,
when the part of the Moon
that's directly lit by the Sun
appears as a slim crescent.
This is partly because there's less
of the bright, sunlit surface to compete
with the dimmer Earthshine-lit portion,
and partly because the phases
of Earth and the Moon are complimentary.
When the Moon is a slim crescent in our sky,
Earth seen from the Moon looks nearly full.
Occasionally, NASA spacecraft use this phenomenon
to make the night side of other planets and moons visible.
For example, Saturnshine on Saturn's moons
and ringshine lighting up Saturn itself,
as seen by NASA's Cassini spacecraft.
The best times to observe Earthshine in November
are on the 17th through the 20th, following sunset,
and before dawn on the 9th through the 12th.
And, for an added treat on the 12th,
the Moon, illuminated by both sunshine and Earthshine,
will appear just above the "Morning Star" Venus.
[whoosh]
Here are the phases of the Moon for November.
You can catch up on all of NASA's missions
to explore the solar system and beyond at nasa.gov.
I'm Preston Dyches from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
and that's What's Up for this month.