In November, the constellations Scorpius and Sagittarius are slowly leaving our night skies to be replaced by Orion and its nebulae, and the bright star Sirius. Looking towards the direction of the celestial pole you can find the constellations Reticulum, the Net; Hydrus, the Little Water Snake; Tucana, the Toucan; and Octans, the Octant, while Crux, the Southern Cross, grazes the southern horizon before rising again in summer.

There is a lot to see this month with just the unaided eye or basic equipment. Look for the Large Magellanic Cloud west of the constellation Pictor, and the Small Magellanic Cloud in Tucana. These are both irregular galaxies close to the Milky Way. A small telescope is all you need to explore the sparkling star clusters as well as the Tarantula Nebula, NGC 2070, nestled within the LMC. The globular cluster 47 Tucanae can be seen with the naked eye as a hazy star very close to the SMC. A large-aperture telescope shows its countless stars packed together in a dense ball. Looking towards the northeast, the Hyades and Pleiades open star clusters make excellent binocular targets.

The Leonid meteor shower is active each November, and this year the Leonids will peak overnight between November17-18. The shower is called Leonids because its radiant, or the point in the sky from which the meteors seem to emerge, lies in the constellation Leo. The Leonids occur when the Earth passes through the debris left by Comet Tempel-Tuttle, which takes about 33 years to make one orbit of the sun.

This month’s conjunctions, which is when two astronomical objects appear close to each other in the sky, include the moon with Saturn on November 2, then with Jupiter on November 10; Mercury with Mars on November 13; and the moon with Mars on November 21, then with Saturn on November 30.

By Nerida Langcake
This article appeared in the November 2025 issue of the Mornington Peninsula Magazine.