October 26
The Nostril of the Monster
Sun Position
The Sun is in Scorpius near -16° declination. Northern Hemisphere mid-latitudes now experience longer nights than days; Southern Hemisphere mid-latitudes have the reverse. The difference will grow until each hemisphere's solstice.
Sky Highlight
Late October is a good period to scan Cetus in the south, as the constellation is well-placed in the evening sky. Mira (the prototype long-period variable star in Cetus) is also here, and its brightness varies enormously over a roughly 332-day cycle. Checking a current almanac will tell you whether Mira is near maximum (naked-eye visibility) or minimum (requiring a telescope).
Deep Sky Object
M77 (NGC 1068), a Seyfert galaxy about 47 million light-years away. M77 in Cetus harbors one of the nearest and best-studied active galactic nuclei, powered by a supermassive black hole of roughly 10 million solar masses surrounded by an obscuring dust torus, a canonical example of the unified model of active galaxies that explains Seyferts and quasars as versions of the same phenomenon. Well-placed for both hemispheres in late October evenings.
Featured Star
Menkar (α Cet) is a red giant (M1.5IIIa) about 249 light-years away, a star that has expanded beyond its main-sequence size and is now losing mass, slowly brightening and cooling in the way all red giants do before their final evolutionary stages. It is designated Alpha Ceti, though Diphda outshines it, an inconsistency inherited from historical labeling. Menkar, the nostril of the sea monster, a red giant fading toward its end.
Around This Date
- October 26, 1959The Soviet newspaper Pravda published the first photographs of the Moon's far side taken by Luna 3, making them publicly available and demonstrating the scale of Soviet space achievement at the time.
- October 28, 1971The United Kingdom's Prospero satellite reached orbit aboard a domestically produced Black Arrow rocket, the only British satellite launched on a British rocket.
Menkar is near its evolutionary end by stellar standards, which means it still has hundreds of millions of years to go.