The Last Quarter moon is November 5th. The waning crescent moon passes a degree north of brilliant Venus in the dawn on November 9th. The moon is new on November 13th. The waning crescent moon will set well before the peak for the Leonid meteor shower on the morning of November 17th. The First Quarter Moon is on November 20th, passing three degrees south of Saturn. The waxing gibbous moon was passes three degrees north of Jupiter on November 25th. The Full Moon, the Beaver Moon, is on November 27th.

Mercury is lost in Sun’s glare in November. Venus dominates the dawn, a shrinking crescent that will appear half lit in December. Mars is in conjunction with the Sun on November 17th directly behind the Sun. This is the month for Jupiter, which comes to opposition on November 2nd. It now lies in Aries. Saturn is in the south in Aquarius in the evening sky.

This spectacular shot of Jupiter was made by the Hubble. To lower right, the famed Great Red Spot is very visible and still larger than Earth! At bottom left is the huge moon Ganymede, the largest moon in our solar system. It is larger than Mercury. It and Callisto, the outermost Galilean, can just miss Jupiter’s poles currently, but smaller, inner Io (orange to left edge) and Europa always pass directly in front of and behind Jupiter’s disk every orbit. Their dark umbral shadows will almost exactly behind them near November 2nd and opposition, with the earth between the Sun and Jupiter. Io and Europa are both similar to our own moon in size, but much brighter, with fresh surfaces of sulfur (Io) and water ice (Europa) instead of the dark volcanic basalt of our lunar mare.

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 October 31st visit the www.skymaps.com website and download the map for November 2023; 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. Sky & Telescope has: www.skyandtelescope.com/observing/astronomy-podcasts.

Setting in the southwest is the teapot shape of Sagittarius, which marks the heart of our Milky Way Galaxy, with Saturn just above the lid of its teapot. 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. 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 North East these clear autumn evenings. Use binocs and your sky map to spot many clusters here, using the SkyMap download to locate some of the best ones plotted and described on the back.

Overhead the square of Pegasus is a beacon of fall. South of it is 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. The constellation Cassiopeia makes a striking West rising in the North East as the Big Dipper sets in the North West. 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 North East now. Her daughter, Andromeda, starts with the North East corner star of Pegasus’’ Square, and goes North East 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. South of it, and visible in binoculars, is M-33 in Triangulum.

To the northeast, Andromeda’s hero, Perseus, rises. 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. Look at Perseus’ feet for the famed Pleiades cluster to rise, a sure sign of bright winter stars to come. This is probably the best sight in the sky with binoculars, with hundreds of fainter stars joining the famed "Seven Sisters" . To the North East , yellow Capella, a giant star the same temperature and color as our much smaller Sun, rises at 7 p.m. as November begins along the northeastern horizon. It is the fifth brightest star in the sky, and a beacon of the colorful and bright winter stars to come in December.