Sky Tour Podcast for November 2025

This month’s episode is sponsored by Celestron, manufacturer of high-quality telescopes and an industry leader in developing exciting optical products with revolutionary technologies.
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I’m Kelly Beatty of Sky & Telescope magazine, and tonight we’re going on a tour of the stars and planets that you’ll see overhead during November. This month, we’ll watch two sets of shooting stars, spot some bright planets, point out a few late-autumn constellations, and put a spotlight on five interesting stars. Are you ready? Then grab your curiosity, and come along on this month’s Sky Tour.
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November is the month when we adjust our clocks to “fall back” an hour to standard time. That takes place before dawn on November 2nd in the U.S. and Canada, a week after our friends in Europe do so. Down Under, our Australian friends moved to summer time in early October. Mexico and tropical countries don’t make the change at all, nor does China or Russia.
Anyway, the return to standard time means that most of us are still heading home from work as evening’s twilight sets in. That’s just fine with me, thank you very much, because it means I can sneak in a little stargazing before dinnertime. 
Full Moon comes early this month, on November 5th, and New Moon follows two weeks later on November 20th, and first quarter on the evening of the 27th. So that means the two middle weeks of this month will be free of moonlight. Now, I love watching the Moon, but its strong light makes it a challenge to appreciate the starry sky overhead. So, with the Moon absent from evening skies starting around November 10th, keep an eye out for two bursts of “shooting stars” this month.
The first is from a meteor shower known as the Taurids. These are bits of debris shed mostly by a periodic comet named 2P/Encke, but other sources might be involved. And their arrival is so spread out, from late October throughout November, that it’s often called the Taurid meteor complex. They appear to streak across the sky starting from the constellation Taurus, which rises in the east not long after evening twilight ends.
Ordinarily this is a weak display, delivering only 5 or 10 meteors per hour even from the darkest of locations. But statistically many Taurids are bright fireballs. And some meteor specialists think that this year we might get more fireballs than usual. So try your luck on one or more clear nights in the coming weeks. And the brightness and relative slowness of many Taurid meteors makes them ideal targets for photography, or for getting some practice with judging exactly which constellations they cross. Lots of observers around the world actually record what they see during meteor showers, details that are very useful to meteor researchers.
The second meteor shower, called the Leonids, is better known. The Leonid shower’s parent comet, 55P/Tempel-Tuttle, tends to leave narrow, concentrated streams of debris in interplanetary space. These produced prodigious displays in 1833, 1866, and 1966 — and most recently in 1999, 2001, and 2002. That’s when the parent comet, which has a 33-year orbit around the Sun, last swung through the inner solar system. But since then, the Leonids have been quite modest, delivering at most about five to 10 faint shooting stars per hour. And Leo doesn’t rise until around midnight, so the best time to look will be in the hours before dawn on November 17th. 
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Planet-wise, only Saturn continues to grace the evening sky, and I’ll get to that in a moment. But let me mention that you can check out two other planets very low in the east before dawn. Venus is still hanging around, but not for long. It rises about 90 minutes before the Sun early in November but only 30 minutes at month’s end. Meanwhile, Mercury has begun a nice but brief appearance before dawn as well. This fast-moving inner planet will be easiest to spot at month’s end and in the early days of December.
So, back to Saturn: The ringed wonder is well up in the southeast as darkness falls, and it’s almost due south and halfway to overhead around 9 p.m. in early November and a bit before 8 late in the month. There aren’t any bright stars close by Saturn, so you shouldn’t have much trouble spotting it. But to help you out, keep an eye on the Moon, which passes close by twice this month, on November 1st and again on the 29th.
Trailing well behind Saturn is brilliant Jupiter. As darkness falls it’s nowhere to be seen, but it pops over the eastern horizon by 10 p.m. early in November and by 8 p.m. at month’s end. By early January, it’ll rise into view by twilight and remain in view all night.
Honestly, after enjoying all five bright planets in the evening sky this time last year, it’s a little disappointing to having most them absent right now. And we’re also still waiting for the brilliant stars and constellations of winter — Orion, Gemini, Sirius, and more — to make their dramatic seasonal entrance. Instead, many constellations in view after sunset are pretty dim. Let me point out a few of those.
As we explored in October’s Sky Tour, the distinctive Great Square of Pegasus is above Saturn by about three times the width of your clenched fist held out at arm’s length. The square itself is a little bigger than your clenched fist. Its four stars are medium bright and easy to spot even in light-polluted settings. 
But after that, the pickings in that direction get slimmer, at least for stars that you can spot easily. For example, Saturn is situated in the middle of Aquarius, the Water Carrier, but its stars are all rather faint. Between the Square and Saturn are the dim stars of Pisces, the Fish. To Saturn’s lower right, three fists away, is Capricornus, a mythical beast with the head of a goat and the tail of a fish. Again, mostly faint stars. And to Saturn’s lower left is Cetus, another far-fetched mythical sea creature usually portrayed as a sea serpent but sometimes with the head of a wild boar or greyhound and the body of a whale or a dolphin.
Don’t be discouraged if you only see a few stars in any of these four constellations. It kind of makes you wonder how ancient skywatchers came up with all these fanciful beasts. 
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This month we’ll take a closer look at five bright stars scattered across the evening sky. Each of them is curiously interesting, and I hope you’ll agree. 
Let’s start above the northeastern horizon and work our way around from left to right. Low in the northeast after twilight ends is Capella, the anchor star in the constellation Auriga. Capella is the sixth-brightest star in the nighttime sky, in part because it’s relatively close to us, only 43 light-years away. But that’s not why it made this month’s must-see list. Although Capella appears to be a single star to your eye, it’s actually a quadruple star system made up of two closely orbiting pairs. 
The dominant duo involves two bright yellow-tinged stars. Each is quite large, 9 and 12 times the Sun’s diameter and around 2½ times more massive. The secondary duo consists of faint, small, relatively cool red-dwarf stars that are separated from the first pair by roughly 1/6 of a light year — about 10,000 times the Earth-Sun distance. So a quick gaze at Capella gets your four stars at once!
Now look to Capella’s lower right by about three fists to reach another obvious star. This is Aldebaran, marking the eye of Taurus, the Bull. It ranks number 14 among the brightest stars, and it’s 67 light-years away. Aldebaran is a red-giant star. Look closely — can you tell that its hue is slightly warmer than Capella’s? It’s also enormous — 45 times bigger than the Sun and about 400 times more luminous. If we swapped Aldebaran for our Sun, it would extend about halfway to the orbit of Mercury.
The name Aldebaran is Arabic for “the follower.” And what is it following? Apparently Arabic skywatchers though it was following the Pleiades, the pretty little star cluster that you can see by eye about 1½ fists above Aldebaran.
Here's a little bonus: Close by the Pleiades to their lower right, just a half fist away, is the planet Uranus. This distant planet reaches opposition on November 21st, and that’s when it’ll be its brightest in the sky. Now technically Uranus can be spotted by eye from a super-dark sky, but it’s almost impossible for most of us. Still, if you’re up for the challenge, or if you have a good pair of binoculars, check out the finder chart in Sky & Telescope’s November issue.
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To get to star #3, head over to Saturn and look below it. The farther south you live, the higher this star will be above the horizon. That’s Fomalhaut (FOE-muhl-hot), the brightest star in the constellation Piscis Austrinus (PICE-iss aw-STRY-nus), the Southern Fish. In fact, Fomalhaut derives from the Arabic words for “mouth of the fish.” This solitary sparkler is the only really obvious star in this otherwise empty-looking stretch of the southern sky, and in fact some skywatchers have nicknamed it the “lonely star.” Around mid-November at 7 p.m., note what’s below Fomalhaut along your horizon — that direction is due south.
Fomalhaut is fairly close by as stars go, only 25 light-years away, and astronomers have been paying it a lot of attention. It looks like a single point of light but it’s actually a double, or binary, star — and astronomers have recently realized that it’s actually triple. The main star is also a fairly young star, and it’s still surrounded by multiple disks of dusty debris left over from its formation several hundred million years ago. Oh, there’s a planet going around it too, first spied with the Hubble Space Telescope in 2008 and studied more recently by the James Webb Space Telescope.
Next, swing around to the right and look above the southwestern sky about halfway to overhead. That bright star is Altair, the anchor star in Aquila, the Eagle, and, with a distance of just 17 light-years, it’s the 12th-brightest star in the night sky. Altair is an abbreviation of Arabic words meaning “the flying eagle.” If you’ve heard this Sky Tour in recent months, you’ll recall that Altair marks one of the corners of the Summer Triangle.
But that’s not what makes it interesting! Nope, it’s because it spins so fast! Altair rotates in just under 8 hours; for comparison, the Sun’s midsection takes 25 days to go around, and its poles take several days longer. Instead, Altair’s spin rate is actually faster than those of Jupiter and Saturn. Like those two planets, Altair’s rapid rotation causes the star to bulge outward at the equator. So its diameter at the equator is 20% greater than its polar diameter — you’d definitely notice that it’s fatter around the middle. And its poles are 3,300°F hotter than its equator.
Finally, swing to Altair’s right by three fists until you reach Vega. That’s Vega [VAY-guh — or some say VEE-guh]. It’s in the constellation Lyra [LIE-ruh], the Lyre, and it’s just 25 light-years away. 
Astronomers gauge a star’s brightness by a number called its magnitude. As I mentioned back in September, Vega is key to measuring the magnitude or brightness of a star. scheme. Some 2,100 years ago the Greek astronomer Hipparchus established this magnitude scale, calling the brightest ones  “stars of the first magnitude” and fainter ones “second,” “third,” “fourth,” “fifth,” and “sixth.” Astronomers still use this approach, and they’ve assigned Vega the magnitude of 0.0. It’s long been used as a standard star for calibrating telescopes. Now, it turns out that four other nighttime stars are brighter, with Sirius the very brightest, and so their magnitudes are negative.
Aside from that important distinction, Vega is also a fast spinner, once every 16.3 hours. So, like Altair, Vega is distinctly fatter around its equator than at its poles. But nailing down this rotation rate proved tricky, because the spin axis of Vega points almost exactly toward Earth, to within 5°.
So don’t fret over the dearth of bright planets and dazzling constellations on these November evenings. Now you’ve got five brights stars to find, each with an interesting story to tell.
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That’s about it for this month. If you want more tips for viewing the night sky, check out our website, SkyandTelescope.org, which offers great star- and planet-gazing activities
If you haven’t already subscribed, you can find Sky Tour on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen. And please leave a rating or review for this month’s episode! Thanks in advance for that.
And if you want to explore the solar system and universe more deeply, please do check out the full line of binoculars and telescopes available at Celestron.com.
Sky Tour is a production of Sky & Telescope, a division of the American Astronomical Society, and is produced by me, Kelly Beatty.
Next month we’ll explore how a bunch of maidens got involved with an angry bull. Until then, I wish you clear skies.