I hope that you all had a wonderful and, of course, spooky Halloween, but that is not the only thing that October brought us. Professor Priaulx gave us the chance to watch the Orionids, Professor Riley helped us visualise the process of photosynthesis, and some of us received a stark reminder as to why the forest is forbidden, just in case anyone had forgotten.
However, it is not good to dwell on the past too much (unless you are revising for your exams), so it is time to focus on what November has in store. The upcoming Moon phases this month are as follows:
| New Moon | First Quarter | Full Moon | Third Quarter |
| November 1st | November 9th | November 15th | November 23rd |
While we were all enjoying the sight of the Orionids, another meteor shower was also underway. This particular one began in mid-October, but will peak around November 12th – November 13th. Its radiant lies in Taurus, which means it is none other than the Northern Taurid shower, which continues all the way into December. The Moon will be in waxing gibbous during the period of this shower’s maximum activity, which is unfavourable, and there are only around five meteors per hour. For comparison, the Orionids peak at up to twenty meteors per hour.
The Leonids will both begin and end this month, running from November 6th to November 30th, with their maximum rate on November 18th. We are likely to see ten per hour from this shower. However, this shower is intriguing as it has shown impressive activity of thousands of meteors per hour in some years. If that isn’t enough to interest you, the Leonids are also the fastest meteors ever recorded, up to 70 kilometres/45 miles per second, and are associated with Comet 55P/Tempel-Tuttle. This particular comet has an orbital period of 33 years.
- Illustration of the Leonid shower of 1870. From Voyages Aeriens by James Glaisher et al. Source
Now seems like the perfect time to highlight the distinction between meteoroids, meteors and meteorites. Meteoroids are small pieces of rock, metal, or both that travel through the solar system. A lot of meteoroids were once part of a larger body, like asteroids or even moons, but a chunk broke off or got blasted off and became a meteoroid. When a meteoroid enters a planet’s atmosphere, friction causes it to burn up as it travels at such a high velocity, and it leaves trails across the sky. These are meteors, and you can typically see a few of these per hour on a clear night, regardless of whether there is a meteor shower that night or not. Most of these pieces of rock will burn up before ever reaching the ground but, if it does survive the journey and hit the planet’s surface, it is called a meteorite. These meteorites are small, some no larger than a regular pebble, and it can be hard to tell them apart from the rocks we have here on Earth already.
Alex J. Halsey
