Volume XXI No. 2 October 2009 What's Inside… Water Everywhere Pg 2 November General Meeting Pg 5 Stewart's Skybox Pg 6 October General Meeting Pg 8 New Members Pg 9 Skywatcher Pg 10 Contacts Pg 11 Theater in the Sky Pg 12 Note: Use bookmark panel in Adobe Reader. 60th Anniversary Luncheon Menu - International Buffet Appetizers: One half hour Hors d'Oeuvres Salad: Tossed Salad with Assorted Dressings Entrees: Beef Bourguignon with Herb Mashed Potatoes Chicken Marsala Sole Florentine Penne Pasta con Vodka all entrees include vegetable du jour Dessert: Vanilla Lace Coffee & Tea Soda: Unlimited Bar: Cash Speakers The Founding of AAI Joe Arcaro Early Reminisces Dr. Lew Thomas Memories Richard & Irene Greenstein "A Surprise" Bonnie Witzgall Water Water Everywhere By Clif Ashcraft as told to Ray Shapp Alien Life, Have A Drink! On September 24th, NASA reported finding water molecules in two unexpected places. Dr. Clif Ashcraft, who is an organic chemist, discussed these discoveries with Ray Shapp. The following article is the result, but first, the two news reports: On the same day, NASA reported that meteorites recently striking Mars have exposed deposits of frozen water not far below the Martian surface. To see whether we should be surprised by all this water, let us take a look at the cosmic abundance of ele-ments. (continued page 3) Water Water Everywhere (Continued from previous page) It turns out that with the exception of helium, which does not form compounds with anything, the next most abundant reactive element after hydrogen is oxygen. It stands to reason that the compound of the two most common reactive elements in the universe should be extremely abundant. Everywhere we look with radio tele-scopes we find hydroxyl radical clouds. This is just the result of water which happened to get too close to an ultraviolet source, like a hot young star, and got chemically disrupted to Ho and OHo as indicated in diagram 2 on the next page. We should not be surprised to find a planet that is almost entirely made of water or ice. We al-ready suspect that Jovian moons have enormous water oceans beneath an ice crust. Here are two related tables with the chemical assumptions upon which they are based. Note that the SiO2 and MgO would actually be incorporated into complex silicate minerals with traces of other stuff. Table 1. Chemical Conversions of the Most Abundant Elements Assumptions: 1) Mg and Si completely react with available oxygen to give oxides which subsequently combine to form magnesium silicate (perovskite) 2) Remaining oxygen, all carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur react with hydrogen 3) Remaining hydrogen reacts with itself to give H2 4) Iron, helium and neon remain in elemental form Element Cosmic Elemental Abundance, ppm* Atomic Weight Gram Atoms Of Elements Per Million Grams Moles Remaining After Chemistry Products Resulting From Chemistry Hydrogen 739,000 1.0 739,000.0 368,036.9 H2 Helium 240,000 4.0 60,000.0 60,000.0 He Oxygen 10,400 16.0 650.0 579.9 H2O Carbon 4,600 12.0 383.3 383.3 CH4 Neon 1,340 20.2 66.3 66.3 Ne Iron 1,090 55.8 19.5 19.5 Fe Nitrogen 960 14.0 68.6 68.6 NH3 Silicon 650 28.1 23.1 23.1 SiO2 Magnesium 580 24.3 23.9 23.9 MgO Sulfur 440 32.0 13.8 13.8 H2S * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_the_chemical_elements Table 2. Abundances of Most Probable Molecules Molecular Weight Molecular Abundance, ppm Weight Percent Not Counting H2, He, Ne Weight Percent Common Name H2 2.0 736,074 73.68% Hydrogen He 4.0 240,000 24.02% Helium H2O 18.0 10,438 1.04% 48% Water CH4 16.0 6,133 0.61% 28% Methane Ne 20.2 1,340 0.13% Neon Fe 55.8 1,090 0.11% 5.0% Iron NH3 17.0 1,166 0.12% 5.4% Ammonia SiO2 60.1 1,390 0.14% 6.4% Silica ** MgO 40.3 962 0.10% 4.4% Magnesia ** H2S 34.0 468 0.05% 2.2% Hydrogen Sulfide **Silica and magnesia combine to give magnesium silicate. This is perovskite, the most abundant mineral in Earth's mantle. (Continued page 4) Water Water Everywhere (Continued from previous page) The calculations in the tables above were done in an Excel spreadsheet by first converting the compositions on a grams per million grams basis (ppm) to a composition based on the number of individual atoms present in a million grams of stuff. We do this by dividing the ppm value by the atomic weight of the element. The result is now in "gram atoms". By the way, one gram atom of any element contains 6.023 x 1023 atoms, which is known as Avogadro's number. That's a lot of atoms. A "mole" is the same number of molecules. Now, if we subtract the number of gram atoms of oxygen needed to form the silica and magnesia from the amount we started with, we get the amount of oxygen available to react with hydrogen to form water. To find out how much hydrogen is left over, we reduce the number of gram atoms of hydrogen by twice the number of gram atoms of remaining oxygen, twice the number of gram atoms of sulfur, three times the number of gram atoms of nitrogen and four times the gram atoms of carbon. Thus the oxygen left over from forming the magnesia and the silica, as well as the sulfur, nitrogen, and carbon are all converted to their hydrides: water, hydrogen sulfide, ammonia, and methane. The remaining gram atoms of hydrogen react with themselves to form the diatomic molecule H2. The number of moles (or gram atoms) of all the remaining or resulting products were then multiplied by the molecu-lar (or atomic) weights to get us back to a weight basis. From this weight basis, we calculate the percentage compositions. Excluding hydrogen, the inert gases, and really negligible trace stuff, the universe consists of 48% water, 28% methane, 5.4% ammonia, 5% iron, 2.2% hydrogen sulfide, 6.4% SiO2, and 4.4% magnesia. The last two add up to about 10% rocks. The diagram at left supplements the tables. Places that don't match this average composition have undergone fractionation of some sort, like having most of the light stuff driven to the outer parts of solar systems with heavy stuff (like rocks) being left behind. Elsewhere, the average composition was altered by chemistry taking place after most of the hydrides like water have been photochemically decom-posed, the hydrogen driven away, and additional chemistry happening. An example of this is Venus where the water got broken up into H2 and O2. The H2 was driven away leaving the O2 to react with the methane making CO2. The same kind of process caused H2S becoming sulfuric acid. However, overall, the universe has a lot of water in it. It is interesting that the molecular abundances of silica and magnesia, on a molar basis, are almost identical. If you combine them chemically on a one to one basis you get the mineral perovskite, named after the Russian mineralogist Count Lev Aleksevich von Perovski, which is simply magnesium silicate, MgSiO3. The perovskites are a general class of minerals having a cubic crystal structure with the formula ABO3. Magnesium silicate, perovskite, is, by far, the most abundant component of the Earth's mantle. In that mineral, A = Mg and B = Si. There are lots of perovskites where other metals can substitute for magnesium as A and other non-metals (like phosphorus) can substitute for the silicon as B in the formula. They also can exist as very complicated mixed silicates where other metals occupy some of the magnesium atom's places in the crystal lattice. So, we should not be surprised by the abundance of water wherever we look in the universe. Even the composition of rocks and the organic compounds from which our bodies are made can be explained by the ready availability of the constituent ingredients. This is merely Nature being natural and using what is readily available! SPECIAL GENERAL MEMBERSHIP MEETING NOVEMBER 14, 2009 "The Heavens Proclaim: Astronomy and the Vatican" Br. Guy Consolmagno Vatican Observatory, Rome, Italy The roots of the Vatican Observatory go back to the Gregorian Reform of the Calendar in 1582, and it has been part of an extensive history of Church support for astronomy (Galileo to the contrary!). Its modern mission is to show there is no inherent conflict between science and religion by simply "doing good science." Br. Consolmagno will look into the history of this activity, including a summary of what is being done at the Vatican Observatory today. Br. Consolmagno obtained his B.A. (1974), and M.A. (1975) degrees at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and his Ph.D. (1978) at the University of Arizona, all in Planetary Sciences. In 1983, he joined the U.S. Peace Corps to serve in Kenya for two years, teaching astronomy and physics. After his return, he took a position as Assistant Professor at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania. In 1989, he entered the Jesuit order, and he took vows as a brother in 1991. On entry into the order, he was assigned as an astronomer to the Vatican Observatory, where he also serves as curator of the Vatican meteorite collection. To accommodate our special guest, this meeting will be held on a special day and date. Note that November 14th is a Saturday. 8:00 p.m. in the Main Lecture Hall Stewart's Skybox by Stewart Meyers By the time you read this article, the LCROSS (Lu-nar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite) mis-sion should have crashed into Cabeus, a crater near the lunar south pole and, hopefully, the initial results have been received. As promised last month, this column will discuss the mission in detail. A Tale of Two Probes In order to tell the story of LCROSS, it is necessary to touch on the story of another lunar mission - LRO (Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter). Back in 2004, President George W. Bush proposed the Vision for Space Exploration (VSE) that, among other things, called for returning humans to the Moon by 2020. Since some of the landing plans would have astro-nauts landing in areas outside of the low latitude ar-eas that were the focus of the Apollo missions, better knowledge of the entire Moon was needed. Even the high-resolution maps from the Clementine mission were not adequate for planning manned landings. To provide the improved information, NASA scien-tists proposed the LRO mission. The spacecraft would have some of the most advanced instruments ever sent to the Moon. One of them, the LROC (Lu-nar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera) is the most powerful imaging system to go to the Moon and can create images down to about one to two meters per pixel in its high- resolution mode. Another is DLRE (Diviner Lunar Radiometer Experiment) that meas-ures temperature variations on the surface. Other instruments include LOLA (Lunar Orbiter Laser Al-timeter) to generate elevation data for lunar maps, and CRaTER (Cosmic Ray Telescope for the Effects of Radiation, to determine the cosmic radiation levels at the Moon. As mentioned in last month's column, as well as in last September's column, there are craters near the lunar poles that have a rather unusual property. Due to the low tilt of the lunar axis, the Sun does not get very high above the horizon at the poles. Because of this, some deep craters in the area never have sunlight reach their floors and have remained con-stantly in the dark for millions, if not billions, of years. These permanently shaded craters are thought to be among the coldest spots in the solar system (any shaded craters on Kuiper Belt Objects beyond the orbit of Neptune or on objects in the much more dis-tant Oort Cloud are probably colder). While this is of great scientific interest, it might also be of practical value. All astronomers know that objects from space have struck the Moon throughout its long history. Many of these objects were fragments of asteroids, or in some cases, asteroids themselves. But pieces of comet nuclei and whole comet nuclei have struck the Moon as well. When these hit, the ice and frozen gases that they contain are immediately vaporized. In most cases, the resulting vapor soon dissipates into space, as the lunar gravity is too weak to retain the gases. However, if such an impact occurs near the poles, there is a chance that some of the vapor might get into a permanently shaded crater. In that case, the vapor would instantly freeze and fall onto the lunar surface. Over time, a deposit of ice and other frozen substances may form. This is of great interest to NASA as well as to other spacefaring powers that are planning lunar missions. If these deposits do exist, future lunar explorers could tap them to obtain water, extract hydrogen for use as fuel, and possibly get other useful elements that are in short supply on the Moon, saving the immense expense of sending these resources from Earth. Two earlier missions tried to address the question. The Clementine probe used its radio signal as a radar beam to probe the polar craters and the results sug-gested the presence of ice in some of them. How-ever, follow-up observations using the Arecibo radio telescope as the radar system failed to confirm the findings. Then, Lunar Prospector, by analyzing the neutrons (produced when cosmic rays hit the lunar surface) that came from the lunar surface also had results that suggested the presence of ice. In an effort to confirm this, the Lunar Prospector probe was com-manded to crash into one of the shaded craters. Sci-entists had hoped that the impact would raise a cloud of surface material that could be examined by tele-scopes on Earth to find the presence of ice. The crash yielded no results. LRO also carries some instruments designed to address the question. LEND (Lunar Exploration Neu-tron Detector) is essentially a more advanced version of the technique that was used with Lunar Prospector. It has much better spatial resolution and is expected to detect hydrogen concentrations in lunar material down to 100 parts per million. Mini-RF is a synthetic aperture radar imaging system. This is a much more advanced version of the radar method used previ-ously. But, it can also be used to study other proper-ties of the lunar surface as well. Then there is LAMP (Lyman-Alpha Mapping Project). In a first for any space mission, LAMP will use the ultraviolet light emitted by stars as sort of a night vision system to see inside of the permanently shadowed craters and look for any visual evidence of ices. Movin' On Up The construction of LRO was going well and it looked like it would be ready to be launched as scheduled on a Delta II rocket. Then, NASA politics intervened. It was decided to use an Atlas V to launch LRO instead. The Atlas V is a much bigger rocket than the Delta II LRO was designed for. Ordinarily, one would think that launching it on a bigger rocket means that it can go faster and get to its destination quicker. But, weight is an important issue on rockets and it appeared that ballast would be needed to en-sure the proper functioning of the rocket. However, another possibility suggested itself. Scientists realized that it would be more productive if, instead of useless ballast, a second mission went up with LRO. However, this solution had some chal-lenges of its own. The second spacecraft would be under a tight weight and size limit. Also, the launch schedule was pretty much set. If the new mission wasn't built and ready in two years, LRO leave with-out it, using ballast instead. Keeping Their Stick on the Lunar Ice Now that there was a slot for a second mission on the same rocket, NASA scientists had to figure out what the new mission was supposed to do. The fail-ure of the crash of Lunar Prospector to even raise a cloud of dust was thought to be possibly due to the fact that the impact lacked the kinetic energy to do the job. Perhaps, if a bigger object could be used as the impactor, a debris cloud might be raised. It was soon realized that the Atlas-Centaur upper stage, being a fairly large object, would make a great impac-tor. This is not unprecedented. During the Apollo mis-sions, the third stages of the Saturn V rockets as well as the used ascent stages of the lunar landers were crashed into the Moon to generate shocks to be measured by the seismometers left by the Apollo as-tronauts. But the challenge would be to find a way to get it to strike a specific target. And the second pay-load could be just what was needed to do the job. Because of the tight time, weight, size, and budget constraints, the team at NASA Ames (and aerospace contractor Northrop Grumman), in the spirit of Red Green and his friends at the fictional Possum Lodge (http://www.redgreen.com) - though far more compe-tently, looked at what equipment they had access to see how they could make a space mission from it. The first thing they noticed was that the Atlas V had a piece of hardware called an ESPA (Evolved expend-able launch vehicle Secondary Payload Adapter) ring. This resembles something one would expect to see at site where a water main is being installed and is es-sentially a large metal ring with a number of round holes cut into the sides. The ESPA ring is intended to hold other satellites that are sometimes launched along with some of the main payloads the Atlas V launches. Upon examination, it was concluded that the ESPA ring could be used as the bus, or frame-work, for a spacecraft. This bold strategy greatly sim-plified the task of constructing LCROSS. (Continued page 8) GENERAL MEMBERSHIP MEETING October 16, 2009 " The Largest Structures in the Universe" Dr. Nicholas Bond Rutgers University Just as planets gravitate into star systems and stars gravitate into galaxies, the distribution of matter on the largest scales is shaped by gravitational forces. With the advent of large optical surveys, such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, astronomers have begun to map these structures with increasing detail and precision. Dr. Bond will discuss some of our latest efforts to identify filament- and wall-like structures in the distribution of galaxies, as well as explain what these structures can tell us about the universe as a whole. 8 p.m. in the Main Lecture Hall Stewart's Skybox (continued from page 7) LCROSS was built by mounting the probe's sys-tems and science instruments on the holes in the ESPA ring. All the instruments and systems are off-the- shelf technology as there was neither the time nor the money to come up with anything revolutionary. Plus this would increase the reliability of the mission since all the components are based on designs that have flown successfully on other missions. The large space in the center of the ring was used to hold the fuel tank for the maneuvering thrusters. These thrust- ers have to steer the Atlas-Centaur upper stage and get it on the path to the intended target as well as maneuver the probe itself in the final moments of the mission. The design can be seen in the illustration on page 7. Not mentioned in detail in the diagram is the array of scientific instruments LCROSS is carrying. These consist of five cameras, one operating in visible light, two in the near infrared, and two in the mid infrared. Also included are three spectrometers to measure the composition of the debris cloud raised by the upper stage. One will work in visible light and the other two will operate in the near infrared. A photometer to measure the brightness of the explosion rounds out the list. Also, in a rarity among space missions, there is no data recorder. LCROSS will be transmitting its data in real-time as it too will crash, about four min- utes after the upper stage. This innovative building approach was a success and LCROSS was ready in time to be included with LRO on the rocket. Launch Time (and Beyond) Though LRO and LCROSS were stowed on the At-las V right on schedule, the launch itself had to be delayed due to problems with a military satellite mis-sion that had to be launched before LCROSS and LRO. But, the Atlas V launched on June 18th, 2009 and all went well. About an hour after the launch, LRO separated from the upper stage to continue its journey to the Moon. LCROSS, as it was planned, remained at-tached to the upper stage. Five days later, LRO reached the Moon and fired its thrusters to enter lunar orbit. But LCROSS would follow a different course. Instead of orbiting the Moon, LCROSS (and the upper stage) went into a long looping orbit around the Earth. There were several reasons for this. One was to allow time for LRO to scout the polar regions of the Moon so NASA scientists could select a suitable crater for the impact. Secondly, the long orbit would allow the upper stage to totally vent its remaining fuel so as not to contaminate the debris cloud. Finally, the upper stage would spend much of this orbit slowly rotating so that any ice that might have formed on it from its passage through the Earth's atmosphere would sub- limate into space, leaving the upper stage empty and dry. In the months leading up to the impact, LRO was far from idle. In July, the LROC took high-resolution images of the Apollo landing sites. In these images, such as the one on page 9 of the Apollo 12 landing site, the lander, other hardware, and even the trails of disturbed regolith left by the astronauts can be seen. LRO also studied the polar regions. Based on its findings, as well as results from earlier missions, there were five craters near the lunar south pole that met the criteria for being LCROSS targets. They had strong hydrogen readings, had permanently shad-owed floors, and were large enough to allow for LCROSS to hit the shaded within its limit of accuracy (LCROSS could deliver the upper stage within a circle about five kilometers in diameter). It's Crashing Time After a long wait, on September 11th, NASA an-nounced that the target for LCROSS would be a cra-ter known as Cabeus A. However, after further analy-sis, a new target was selected - Cabeus on Septem-ber 28th. The reason for the change was that Cabeus A had parts of its floor that did receive sunlight, while Cabeus had a fully shadowed floor. At a slight risk of another "Dewey Defeats Truman" story - I am writing this before the event due to news-letter deadlines, here is the sequence of events lead-ing up to the impact (in Eastern Time): 10:30 PM, October 8th: After final targeting, the LCROSS probe separates from the Atlas V upper stage and uses its thrusters to move some distance be-hind the spent booster. 7:30 AM, October 9th: The Atlas V upper stage smashes into the shadowed floor of Cabeus at a speed of 2.5 kilometers a second. The resulting explosion, with a yield of 1.5 tons of TNT, gouges out a crater about 20 to 25 meters in diameter and about 3 to 5 meters deep. The 200 tons or so of lunar material ejected by the blast rises in a plume to an altitude of about 10 kilometers where it is studied by LRO, LCROSS, the HST and many ground-based tele-scopes. 7:34 AM: The LCROSS mission ends when the LCROSS probe itself crashes into Cabeus. After the Lunar Dust Settles… So, if all went well on the morning of October 9th, we should know the answer to the over a decade-old question of what is inside the permanently shaded, very cold, craters at the lunar pole and how it will af-fect plans for future lunar exploration. How big are the stars, and how far away? Answer: Most stars are comparable in size to the Sun, but their distances are way beyond any solar system measure. Last month, we asked similar questions about the Sun and Moon. In answer, we gave numbers and some comparisons. It will be worthwhile to recall a few of both here. In terms of size among stars, the Sun is sort of middling. Leaving out certain exotic "stars," the smallest ones are perhaps a hundredth of Sun's size, and such giants as Antares and Betelgeuse are hundreds of times as big. In any case, stellar size is hard to define, because a star does not have a solid surface; and it is variable because, for example, a star will expand as its nuclear fire begins to die. The November 2009 Sky and Tele-scope, page 12, expands (no pun) on this for the particular case of Betelgeuse. Their distances from us, however, dwarf any within the solar system. We said the average Earth-Sun sepa-ration is 93 million miles. This is a handy unit for planetary distances, and indeed it is called the astronomical unit (abbreviated au.) Mercury is just 1/3 au from the Sun, and Pluto ranges from 30 to 40 au away. By con-trast, Sirius is among our closest stellar neighbors, and it is more than half a million au from here. Sirius is a good example, because the first attempts to fix stellar distances used the idea that bright stars are bright because they are close to us. Already 2300 years ago, critics of Aristarchus's theory that Earth orbits the Sun pointed out that such motion would make those bright stars appear to shift position relative to the faraway stars. That shift of perspective is called parallax. Aristarchus could only argue that the parallax is undetectably small. The first measurements of parallax, and thereby distance, had to wait until telescopes and the 1800's. The figure illustrates the lines of sight (both shown red) from Earth and from the Sun to Sirius. The angle be-tween those lines has been put at about 0.38 second of arc. But look the other way, from Sirius toward us. The angle labeled is necessarily also .38". Think of it: The star is so far away that from there, the 93-million-mile (1 au) radius of Earth's orbit has an angular size of .38" 0.000105 of a degree. Compare that to the angular size we gave for Sun and Moon as seen from Earth, ˝ degree, almost 5,000 times angle . From what we saw last month, the radius, the distance to Sirius, and are related by (radius/distance) x 57.3. You can solve for distance (1 au/.000105 degree) x 57.3 550,000 au. Even for close stars, the astronomical unit is an awfully small measure. Astronomers, therefore, adopted two other distance units. One of them is the light year (ly), the distance light travels in a year. Light can travel 1 au in about 8.3 minutes of time (93 million mi/186,000 mi per sec = 500 sec). Multiply (1 au per 8.3 minutes) x 1440 min per day x 365.3 days per year, and you estimate the light year at 63,000 au. That means Sirius is 550,000 au/63,000 au per ly 8.7 ly away. For the other unit, imagine changing the diagram by moving Sirius closer to Earth, so as to increase the parallax angle to exactly one sec-ond of arc. The resulting distance, roughly 3.3 ly, is defined as a parsec (pc). "Parallax second" gives the dis-tance its name. By this measure, Sirius is about 2.6 pc distant. EMAIL CONTACTS presi-dent@asterism.org President of AAI editor@asterism.org Editor of The Aster-ism Ray Shapp, Editor Deadline for submis-sions to each month's newsletter is the first Friday of that month. member-ship@asterism.org AAI Membership Chair trus-tees@asterism.org All three Trustees of AAI ray@asterism.org Ray Shapp for the website exec@asterism.org Executive Committee plus Trustees QOs@asterism.org All Qualified Observ-ers info@asterism.org AAI president, corre-sponding secretary, and computer ser-vices chair re-search@asterism.org Research Committee techni-cal@asterism.org Technical Committee MEMBERSHIP DUES Regular Membership: $21 Sustaining Member-ship: $31 Sponsoring Member-ship: $46 Family Membership: $5 First Time Ap-plication Fee: $3 Sky & Telescope: $32.95 Astronomy subscription: $34 (Subscription renewals to S&T can be done directly. See "Membrship-Dues" on website for details.) AAI Dues can be paid in person to Membership Chair or Treasurer, or by mail to: AAI, PO Box 111, Garwood, NJ 07027-0111 DOME DUTY October 23 Team B October 30 Team C November 6 Team D November 13 Team E November 20 Team A FRIDAYS AT SPERRY October 23, 2009 "Space News / Ask Dr. Lew" Karl Hunting / Dr. Lew Thomas October 30, 2009 "Tales from the Darkside (of the dome) - True(?) Tales of Spooky Stuff" Alan Witzgall November 6, 2009 What's Up: A Down-to-Earth Sky Guide Kathy Vaccari All schedules above were accurate at time of publication. Please check www.asterism.org for latest information (click on "Club Activities") DR. LEW'S SEMINARS See Dr. Lew Thomas for possible upcoming seminar topics. (Choice of topic at Dr. Lew's seminars is determined by partici-pants' interest) November 2009 is a quiet month for planet watchers. None of the major players is anywhere near its most attractive. Venus and Jupiter are nearing the ends of their runs, while Mars and Saturn are just beginning to get interesting. Venus has been a morning object since March and no longer rises before the start of twilight. It can, how-ever, be used to locate a very thin waning crescent Moon around the 15th. Jupiter is also on the way out, falling toward evening twilight and setting around 10 PM. During the first three evenings of November the Giant Planet hovers about a third of a degree above tiny Iota Capricorni for binocular users. Just as Jupiter is setting, Mars is rising. The Red Planet reaches negative magnitude this month surpassing in brightness all the stars except Sirius and Arcturus. On the very first evening of the month Mars is within the Beehive star cluster which marks the center of Cancer, the Crab. Saturn is still near its dimmest of the year, but its rings are beginning to open up, and it now rises four hours before the Sun. Mercury actually passes behind the disk of the Sun on the 5th, technically becoming an eve- ning object, but not really becoming visible until December. The most exciting event of the month may be the Leonid meteor shower. It has been seven long, quiet years since the spectacular 2002 Leonids, but we may break the losing streak this month. Computer models all predict a primary peak around 4:30 pm EST on the 17th, invisible for us, but an earlier, secondary peak is ex-pected to occur around 2:30 am, with a possible 200+ meteors per hour. Fortunately, the Moon is totally out of the picture..