THIS MONTH IN SPACE: November
Every day a different image.
SUN: major solar storms have been going on; the Northern Lights were
seen as far south as Georgia in early November.
MOON: last Full Moon was on Halloween. New Moon (start of Ramadan
in Islamic countries) on November 15.
MERCURY: rises in early morning, very close to brighter Venus.
VENUS: Morning Star; rises about 5:30 a.m.
MARS: very conspicuous in the south in early evening; sets around 10:30 p.m.
JUPITER: rises about 8:30 p.m. Nearby are the Twins (Castor and Pollux in Gemini).
SATURN: rises about 7 p.m. The nearby bright shimmering red
star is Aldebaran, the eye of Taurus the Bull.
LEONID METEOR SHOWER: expected to be unusually heavy this year. Peak will
be on night of November 18/19, especially in early morning just before dawn.
NASA's MARS ODYSSEY spaceprobe is
now sending data from Mars.
Astronauts Victor Afanasyev, Konstantin Kozeev, and Claudie Haignere returned to Earth from the Space Station Alpha on October 31.
The RUSSIAN SPACE FORCE will launch a military satellite on November 23.
A PROGRESS M-17 freighter will be launched from Russia to the Space Station Alpha on November 26.
The Space Shuttle ENDEAVOUR will fly to Space Station Alpha on November 29.
A METEOR 3M Russian weather satellite will be launched on November 30.
A LARGE IMPACT CRATER only 4300 years old has reportedly been discovered in southern Iraq. If the date is correct, the meteor hit coincided with (and perhaps caused) major bad times in the ancient world: the collapse of the Akkadian Empire (which included the crater site), the end of the pyramid-building Fifth Dynasty in Egypt, and a general decline of ancient civilizations throughout the Middle East. See news story in
The London Sunday Telegraph.
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