Starting this week, the moon will be moving into its final phase and reach new moon on November 6, marking the end of another Lunar month. The end of October will end quietly, but the early November sky has proved to be exciting. M110, what Foster called the brightest satellite galaxy of the Andromeda galaxy, will be well placed and visible all night long on November 1. The Andromeda Galaxy can be found in the Andromeda constellation, which is wedged between Perseus and Cassiopeia. If you ever have trouble finding constellations, there are many great free apps that you can download that will identify stars when you point your phone to the sky. I found such apps helpful when I first started sky watching.
Also on November 1, asteroid 40 Harmonia will shine the brightest in our sky and visible with a telescope as it makes its closest motion to the Earth. The alignment here is like how we see the moon illuminated at night: the asteroid will be lit by the light of the sun in front of it, and the Earth is placed in the middle. On November 2, M32 and the entirety of the Andromeda Galaxy will be at its brightest and well placed all night long, reaching its peak around midnight. The apparent magnitude, or visible brightness, will still be relatively low, so a pair of binoculars will be helpful for the viewing.
On November 3, NGC 253, the Sculptor Galaxy, will be visible but mainly in the Southern Hemisphere. In the Northern Hemisphere where we are, NGC 253 will be visible between midnight and 2 am. It will only reach about 22 degrees above our horizon, which can be measured by about the distance of two fists when your arm is elongated. If you measure that out, you can see that it is not very high in the sky, therefore, it may be hard to see with all the trees around campus. Regardless, the Sculptor Galaxy is a beautiful spiral galaxy that is also a starburst galaxy. Though it may sound sweet and tasty, starburst means that the galaxy is currently undergoing an intense period of star formation. The birth of a star is a violent event, with gravity pushing and pulling particles towards the center with stellar winds whirl-pooling the particles into a disk shape. As the disk, or maybe more of a ring, shrinks and particles get more and more dense, a star begins to form in the center. What we are left with is the site of the glowing, growing star illuminating the beautiful spiral shape of the moving particles. It is a spectacular and beautiful site. The colors emitted come from the composition of these particles that often consist of oxygen, hydrogen, and helium, among other elements resulted from the death of other stars. So, although it may not look impressive with our naked eye, it is worth noting just how vast and amazing this galaxy is.
It is also worth noting how amazing you are as well, because many of those same components can be found in you. For example, the iron in our blood is the legacy of the deaths of giant stars that exploded in Super Novas millions, if not billions of years ago. Hydrogen, about 96 percent of us, is the fuel that stars use to survive for billions of years. Nearly all the elements that can be find within us or on Earth are either a result of star birth or death. We are as much a part of space as anything else out there, and that’s such an empowering thing! So, the next time you put yourself down, just remember where you came from and what you’re made of!