The Sky Above You, November 2026
by Duncan Lunan
The Moon is New on November 9th, after passing Mars on the 2nd, Jupiter and Regulus in Leo on the 3rd. going on to pass Saturn on November 20th. Full Moon on the 24th is a Supermoon, at its closest to Earth, and on the 28th it occults Praesepe, the stellar cluster in Cancer. Jupiter, Mars and Regulus are all near the waning Moon again on the 29th and 30th. My apologies for being late with this forecast, due to another spell in hospital, but I hope to be back on schedule at the beginning of December.
The planet Mercury is at its best morning appearance for the year in the second half of November, to lower left of Venus and greatest distance from the Sun on November 20th.
Venus reappears in the morning sky and is furthest from the Sun on the 20th, after which Spica in Virgo loops around it during late November.
Mars and Jupiter are both in Leo, near Regulus, rising around 11.00 p.m.. Moving downwards, Mars passes Jupiter on the 16th. Both planets are again near the Moon on 29th and 30th. As Jupiter nears its equinox in December, its four major moons will take part in an increasingly complex series of eclipses and occultations, detailed in the October issue of Astronomy Now and after.
As November goes on we expect to have our first detailed view of the asteroid Dimorphos and its satellite Didymos, since the latter was impacted by NASA’s DART probe on September 26th, 2022. Europe’s follow-up probe HERA should be returning close encounter images any time now, after launch on October 27th 2024. HERA had its first separate view of the post-collision pair in October 2026, and after rendevous the first close-ups should be any time now. We literally have no idea what to expect: a huge plume of debris came off from Didymos in the impact, its orbit was changed dramatically, and the surface could show anything from a sharp new crater to complete resurfacing. The detailed studies will include landing a small cubesat on Didymos in January, as well as whatever effects there have been on Dimorphos. Whatever we learn will have a major influence on future studies to protect Earth from similar or far worse events.
Saturn in Pisces passed opposition, its nearest to Earth, on October 4th, when it was visible all night long, and now it sets at 3 a.m., passed by the Moon on November 20th.
Uranus, in Taurus, is at opposition to the Sun on the 25th and to the Earth on the 26th, at its nearest to us in Taurus between Aldebaran and the Pleiades.
Neptune in Pisces sets at 2.20 a.m..
The Sky Above You
By Duncan Lunan
About this Column
I began writing this column in early 1983 at the suggestion of the late Chris Boyce. At that time the Post Office would allow 1000 free mailings to start a new business, just under the number of small press newspapers in the UK at the time. I printed a flyer with the help of John Braithwaite (of Braithwaite Telescopes) offering a three-part column for £5, with the sky this month, a series of articles for beginners, and a monthly news feature. The column ran from May 1983 to May 1993 in various newspapers and magazines, but never in more than five outlets at a time, although every one of those 1000-plus papers would have included an astrology column. Since then it’s appeared sporadically in a range of publications including The Southsider in Glasgow and the Dalyan Courier in Turkey, but most often, normally three times per year, in Jeff Hawke’s Cosmos from the first issue in March 2003 until the last in January 2018, with a last piece in “Jeff Hawke, The Epilogue” (Jeff Hawke Club, 2020). It continues to appear monthly in Troon's Going Out and Orkney News, with an expanded version broadcast monthly on Arransound Radio since August 2023
The monthly maps for the column were drawn for me by Jim Barker, based on similar, uncredited ones in Dr. Leon Hausman’s “Astronomy Handbook” (Fawcett Publications, 1956). Jim had to redraw or elongate several of them because they were drawn for mid-US latitudes, about 40 degrees North, making them usable over most of the northern hemisphere. The biggest change needed was in November when only Dubhe, Merak and Megrez of the Big Dipper, as the US version called it, were visible at that latitude. In the UK, all the stars of the Plough are circumpolar, always above the horizon. We decided to keep an insert in the January map showing the position of M42, the Great Nebula in the Sword of Orion, and for that reason, to stick with the set time of 9 p.m., (10 p.m. BST in summer), although in Scotland the sky isn’t dark then during June and July.
To use the maps in theory you should hold them overhead, aligning the North edge to true north, marked by Polaris and indicated by Dubhe and Merak, the Pointers. It’s more practical to hold the map in front of you when looking south and then rotate it as you face east, south and west. Some readers are confused because east is on the left, opposite to terrestrial maps, but that’s because they’re the other way up. When you’re facing south and looking at the sky, east is on your left.
The star patterns are the same for each month of each year, and only the positions of the planets change. (“Astronomy Handbook” accidentally shows Saturn in Virgo during May, showing that the maps weren’t originally drawn for the Hausman book.) Consequently regular readers for a year will by then have built up a complete set of twelve.
©DuncanLunan2013, updated monthly since then.